No Place for MySpace

with just out of obligation. So let's poke around and share the secrets of what took this social media platform out of the friend zone and into a forgotten link. This is my Space on the Brink. Hi, I'm Jonathan Strictly and I'm Aerial Casting, and you're listening to the Brink where we are exploring the almost forgotten website my Space. I mean it still exists, like we said, yeah, But I mean I think there are people who might be listening to this podcast right now who are like, what

is what is my Space? Or I've heard of that, but I've never seen it. So interest of full disclosure, Ariel and I both at least once upon a time had active MySpace accounts. Yes, I think I maybe added two things to mine. I was a desperate clinger to live journal prior to joining Facebook, but I kind of made an almost direct link I had in my Space, but I didn't utilize it. I used my Space quite a bit for a while, and I clung to it

for a while. I actually had a MySpace profile, and when when Facebook finally opened up and allowed old people like me who were no longer college students to finally join, I maintain both and MySpace and a Facebook file. But they did fall off the brink. I would argue, like the value of that company plummeted to a ridiculous amount. When you look at how much it was valued at its peak versus how much it was last sold for. It was a phenomenal difference. But like we said, they

didn't completely go away, so they just fell into obscurity. Yeah, so it's not like this is one of those stories where you have a company that has gone into say bankruptcy, and just sort of faded out. Even our Toys or Us story, we talked about how that company seemingly was gone for good and then now there's a an effort to sort of resurrect the brand. My Space never quite went to fully dead. It's only mostly dead. Yeah, So let's talk a little bit about history before we get

into what happened. Sure. So my Space was founded in two thousand three, as we said in the intro, by Christy Wolfe and Tom Anderson. Tom Anderson being your friend to Tom. When you get joined, everybody gets a friend with Tom, or did. At least in the beginning, they weren't actually a social media site. There were an e marketing site called the Universe and they sold things like diet pills and stuff you might google to see is

this actually legit? Yeah, And they were looking around at some of the other sites that were starting to get popularity, and we could even do an episode on this social media platform. At some point, they were looking at a thing that was called Friendster. Now, did you have a friends Stair account? I did not. Friendster was one of those things that came and went before I ever. I think maybe I checked it out once or twice, but

I never made an event uh profile for it. There are a couple of social media sites that fall into that category. But they looked at Friendster. It was a popular site. They saw that there was a lot of what we would now call engagement, and they thought, we want to see that kind of activity on what we're working on. How can we do that? Yeah, Yeah, so they've basically just copied it. So that turned out to be a working strategy. Yeah, And it was specifically so

that they could do what is called influencer marketing. Yeah, this is something that we're all pretty familiar with these days. It's, you know the idea of people who get big followings on social media and then brands will reach out to them and have those people leverage their fame to market

on behalf of those brands. Yeah. So what they did to get those influencers was they went and they recruited all of the quote unquote hot girls that Friendster had kicked off of their social media site to join my Space um, as well as bands and photographers, really anybody who your average Joe Schmo would want to follow and be a internet friend of. Yeah. So essentially, the the tried and true method of how can we attract people

to this site? Well, for guys, let's just give them the feeling that all these extremely attractive women want to be friends with. Yes, the strategy did work. However, later on, much much later on, analysts would say that using that strategy was sort of a predictor that my Space would inevitably fail because they were coming at the angle of creating a social networking platform from the wrong position, that they weren't doing it as social networking first, then find

a way to monetize it. They were looking at a way to monetize something, and they went to the social networking site. Now, in defense of my Space, there wasn't a whole lot of precedent for what they were doing. I think that focusing on on the individual instead of on the networking it's it's something that is called Read's law actually, where they say that the success of a social network is to get the people to connect with

each other and do so within groups. Yeah. If you get the more people you can get active on your social networking site, the more valuable the site is. So, and it has to do with not just not really just the number, but also the value of the connections between the people. And as we will discover, one of my spaces challenges was allowing for those meaningful connections to

have Yeah. Yeah. In two thousand four, my Space breaks one million users, a month, and now they're getting some bigger names to promote their site, like R. E. M. And we're familiar with because you know those are local boys athletes Georgia. And they made some design decisions that were interesting. Yeah, I mean at face value, they seem

pretty cool. They decided to let the members guide how to build this site, so anybody could take their profile page and add whatever widgets, videos, backgrounds, backgrounds, articles they wanted to special cursors. Yeah, which you know, from a user standpoint like, this is super customizable. This is really cool, but in actuality it just led to a bunch of really messy cluttered stuff. Yeah. Eye source. With ucebook profiles,

you know, you can add things like photos. You can change out your little cover photo at the top and your profile picture, and if you want to, you can do things that affect your Facebook profile but not anyone else's, Like you could change the language like the pirate or something. But my Space had it where you could actually change the appearance of your profile, the background color. You could put a photo up like that could be like a

tiled photo as your background cover. You could put in various songs that were connected to MySpace, so you could have songs playing automatically if you wanted to so as soon as someone visited your profile, you know, Matchbox. So it was definitely one of those things that I felt. One, there was not a cohesive experience, right, you could go to two different profiles and have two wildly different reactions

to it. And for another, it meant that a lot of people just kind of took a kitchen sink approach to their profiles, like any any sort of switched they could toggle on, they were going to toggle and it made it super irritating. It actually reminded me a lot of Geo Cities, which is another company we could cover on the brink at some point. So not the best experience once these things were all implemented, although many of them were introduced over time, so it wasn't like it

just instantaneously went to an ice ore. Yeah, and it didn't have a negative effect immediately. In fact, my space is doing so well that in two thousand and five it was purchased by News Corps headed by Rupert Murdoch for five and eighty million dollars. Yeah, that more than half a billion dollars. Now at the time, people thought that's a whole lot of money. Right now, in retrospect, people have said that was way too much money. And part of this was because they were in a bidding war.

Wasn't just that they were Yeah, they were actually fighting with Viacom to buy it. So this this was something where you had two very wealthy companies with very deep pockets ready to go after the same property. Things didn't go sour immediately. Again, the narrative tends to be the news Core spent way too much money buying my Space and then my Space tanked, But in reality that's not exactly what happened. No, so news Corp bought my Space, They're like, you guys, do your thing. Yeah, we're not

gonna micromanage. Yeah, but they're a big company, and so with a big company comes red tape to make any changes, to develop things, to resolve conflicts. And so even though they didn't intend to interfere, they were still interfering. But they weren't interfering in a progressive way. Right. This is one of those issues where you've got the culture clash from two different organizations, and when they merged together, you

have to figure out how to reconcile that. Yeah, but that being said, by September of two thousand five, my Space was up to twenty seven million members, and in the following year they would become the most popular, the top social network site in the United States. Now, again, to be fair, at least, when two thousand six opens, you're looking at a pretty barren field for social networking sites. Right,

Facebook was only open to college students. Facebook had launched in two thousand four, and by two thousand and six they were open to more than a couple of dozen college campuses. But if you didn't have a valid college email, you could not have That was frustrating because I had friends who do theater, so I've got friends all over the age spectrum, and I had some older friends who were using their old college emails to get in, and

I was very envious. I had already graduated college, so I didn't have the opportunity, and I didn't maintain a college email address. So yeah, I was not able to get a Facebook account when it first opened. Also, why would any one already have my Space and my Space didn't have that restriction. Also, at this time, my Space lands a really good deal. They make a deal with Google and exclusive deal for ads for three years for nine d million dollars based on site traffic. That's an enormous,

enormous ad deal, obviously, Yes. However, it had an effect on the user experience as well, right, yes, because it was an enormous ad deal, which meant an enormous amount of ads, which made these already cluttered sites even more cluttered with things that you couldn't necessarily turn off. All of these ads that my Space wanted to push the

whole behind purpose for my Space. And meanwhile, my Space was also starting to get into some trouble due to the fact that there were these rather lascivious, provocative images, let us say, racy as you have put in photos, and this was that was like one of the initial strategies that they had to attract people to the site. But now they were starting to get a lot more attention about these racy photos and to the point where people were starting to question whether or not my Space

might even be a porn site. Yeah. Yeah, there were investigations launched to figure out whether they were exposing pornography to minors. So now you've got people thinking, well, maybe this isn't the safest place for me or my family. Maybe instead, I should look to alternatives, and Facebook was right around the corner. In September two thousand six, Facebook would open up the platform so that anyone with an email address who was thirteen years or older could get

a Facebook profile. Now people did and do still get around that age limit. Despite all that, in two thousand seven, my Space is still going strong, despite the people saying, well, maybe I should try Facebook. Facebook might be a safer place for us. And despite the reputation, my Space had about three hundred million registered users and a evaluation of twelve billion. Twelve that's based on numbers that may or may not come true, So right, that's a number that's off.

The cited that twelve billion dollar valuation. It is very difficult to nail down exactly where that value was. It was largely in the promise of having three million people and an x amount of landscape where they could potentially show advertising, and a estimation of how much those ads would be worth. It was based on a lot of

estimations essentially. However, at this time in my Space's heyday of use, news Corps decides that it wants to start focusing on something else, and that's something else is trying to buy the Wall Street Journal, and meanwhile, Facebook is starting to catch up. It had not caught up entirely to my Space yet, but it was chomping at the heels. So here's my Space at its peak, valued at twelve

billion dollars tons of users. Facebook is catching up. But it looked like at the time that even if Facebook did catch up, there'd still be plenty of room for both platforms to coexist. However, as it turns out, even though no one was sure about it yet, my Space was actually on the brink and it was just about to fall off. We'll explain more in just a moment, but first let's take a break to thank our sponsor. Alright, So by two thousand and eight, my Space was making

good money for social media site. Again, not a whole lot of competition out there, but they're making good money one hundred million dollars in counting. Later on in two thousand eight, Facebook takes their number one spot for a number of users. My Space was still getting more traffic until two thousand nine, but Facebook just had more users than my Space, and by the way, that would never

change Facebook. Facebook would never lose that spot to my Space from this point moving forward, So while my Space still had more traffic on a day to day basis, that was limited because Facebook was already in the lead, and it was never kind of look back. It's fair to note that Facebook at this time in two thousand

and eight was already ahead of my Space overseas. This is when it overtook my Space in the United States, so a complete overtake in that regard, and right towards the end of two thousand eight and into the beginning of two thousand nine, another big change happens. D Wolf and Anderson both leave the company, so that the co founders of my Space leave at that point, and they both have had things to say about the direction of my Space, both when they were running it and when

news Corps took over, and they're fairly candid. In fact, I've read interviews where they were pretty clear about their own mistakes. It wasn't just pointing at news Corps saying they're the reason that things massed up. They said, we made some bad decisions. Tom Anderson, for one, said I had this social aspect in my head from the beginning, but instead of building it from the onset, we kind of tried to overlay it later on, and that was more difficult than we expected, right, but the wolf would

leave first. He would step down officially on April twenty second, two nine. And at this point cracks were starting to show in my Space. So this got to a point also where we have to talk about a feature my Space had that paradoxically hurt the company, although it's something we normally associate with good business practice, which is transparency. Yeah. On Facebook and a lot of social media applications, you

cannot see when somebody unfriends you or leaves the site. Yeah, Like on Twitter, if someone and follows me, I don't automatically know. Yeah. On Facebook, you can decline someone's friend request and unless they follow up on it, they won't know. Or you can defriend them later and again unless they follow up on it and say, hey, why am I not seeing posts from this person? They don't know, which is you know, can be good or bad depending on

how many people that person is following. But on my Space, when you try to access somebody's account, you can see the last time they accessed it and whether they are an active user or not. So if you go on and you see that these people that you were following are no longer using my Space, either frequently or at all, You might go, why am I even still here? Why am I here? Maybe I should stop using it too, So that ended up actually being a weakness for my Space.

One of the other things that was starting to become clear is that Facebook had been built from the ground up as this social networking platform, whereas my Space had

come from more of an entertainment perspective. And in fact, my Space would really lean into that entertainment side quite a bit as time would go on, it would double and triple and quadruple down on being related to entertainment, largely the music industry, but not only the music Yeah yeah, well, I mean largely music industry because they were the first

adopters pretty much. And then one of the other things that differentiated my Space from Facebook was that on Facebook, if you wanted a profile, you had to use your actual name, and my Space they wanted you to use a handle or you know, an alias. And this requires some backtracking a little bit. Back in the early days of the Internet, the general thought was that you would use a handle a nickname everywhere you wouldn't share genuine

personal information that's not safe It's so different now. Now we get into cars with people that we don't know that we used an app on our phone to connect to right. But back then you wouldn't share your name online. It was considered to be dangerous potentially. However, what it also allowed you to do on Facebook was look for your friends and your family who also had profiles and

make it very easy to connect with them. On my Space, it was not easy to connect with people you knew because my Space depended upon shared interests, not whether or not you know that person in real life. So you could share your MySpace user name with people and they could add you that way, but there was no easy way with in the network itself for you to track

down your friends and your family. You just had to hope that we're friends like the same weird stuff you liked, and sadly not enough people like eating jello and their underwear while listening to they might be giants. So I had hardly any friends, which I don't understand at all. That's like the best thing, don't knock it to get trying people. They also had poor product developments, so my

Space made a bunch of products and features. As we said, they were rolled out slowly, but maybe not slowly enough. They were poorly built, and they had a lot of bugs, and it cost a lot of frustration among the users. Yea Krista Wolf would say that one of the big reasons he felt my Space faltered was that they were

spread too thin. They had all these ideas for different features they wanted, and instead of contracting that out or inviting developers to work on the platform with them, they decided to try and tackle it all themselves, and they just didn't have the skill set to do it, nor did they have the focus because they were trying to do too many things at once, and so what you ended up with, we're a bunch of half baked features that didn't work so well and just added to that

user experience frustration. Meanwhile, Facebook was taking the different approach. They opened up an a p I and application programm er interface and they said, if you want to build applications on top of the Facebook platform, do it. And that meant that you had teams that were really focused on creating very specific functions and they could make it really, really great because that's all they were working on. They just wanted to make that one thing. My Space was

trying to make all of the one things. Yeah. Yeah, so my Space had a bunch of feature bloat on top of their ads, yeah, just making it even more messy. Yeah. And they also tried to go more global at that time, and unfortunately the expansion they couldn't really make a lot of progress because Facebook had really taken most of those markets already. The one place that was an exception was Mexico. Yeah, so in two nine they do it all companies facing the brink do and they lay off a bunch of

employees their employees, right, that was pretty rough. They also, uh, this was something I did not know until I read the notes that you had put together for this episode. My Space was in some ways a banner child for the wasteful startup, even though at this point they were no longer a startup. They were part of a much larger company. One of the things I often associate in my head with startup companies is ostentatious expensive office space

that tends to emphasize style over function. MySpace managed to go one better than that. Yeah, they were paying a million dollars a month for an office in Paia Vista, and they never actually moved in they might have had intentions to, but they didn't. So they're paying a million dollars a month for an empty office space. Yes, wow, all right, yeah, so that that's by the way, we're gonna have some lessons at the end of this episode about about things that my Space did wrong. I'm just

gonna cut to the chase here. That's bad businesses to pay a million dollars for space that you're not using. And news Corps would eventually in say, you know, maybe we made a few missteps. We might not have done this the best way over the last couple of years, which was the entire time that they had had my Space. Yeah, they're like three or four years, you know, like you've

had five, so the first year you were good. In two and ten they also decided what we're going to fix that, We're just gonna try to copy Facebook, and they even integrated with Facebook Connect, but it was too late. Yeah, people who were interested in Facebook on Facebook, they need to have a second Facebook to their Facebook. It wasn't that mean, yo, dog, I see who like Facebook? So

I put Facebook in your Facebook? And yeah, but there there's a common theory that if they had started copying Facebook from the beginning that maybe they could have they would have just been Facebook. They would have hold on to their their user base, and then Facebook would have only been an aging college population. Yeah, which is what they did in the first place, because they copied friends

stre so they didn't follow their own success line. And Mike Jones, who was the CEO of the company, was essentially he said, We're not really a social networking site anymore. We're not like Facebook now. We are a social entertainment destination. And this was really where we saw a big push

to redefine my Space. Unfortunately, my Space as popularity had fallen so much that this rebranding, even though it would take place a couple of different times, like they tried rebranding a couple of times, didn't have the impact needed to really bring my Space back force. So they tried to just be a complementary service. Bands could use to Facebook to promote their music, which is still something that

happens today. Although I'm surprised because it's only bands discovering other bands, I would imagine, I mean it's I will say that if you want to check out music and music videos, the way it works on my Space is way easier than on Facebook. Facebook is not well designed for that now it's not. However, everything else, like all the people you know, tend to be on Facebook. So there's still is not that much call to go over to my Space. So my Space knew it was, you know,

I said, we're an entertainment hub. They were predicting a loss of a hundred and sixty five million dollars in two thousand eleven. That was the expected loss after laying off a large amount of people, leaving them with like only four dred and fifty employees. They had had almost a thousand more than that just a couple of years earlier. Yeah, and and then that year their users dropped by nine million.

That's that's a lot of people. Yeah. And then in two thousand eleven, one of the most infamous deals in business history, let alone the Tech Business History News Corps would sell my Space. They tried to sell my Space for around a hundred million dollars, but they eventually had to settle for thirty five million dollars at least that's what was reported. That million dollar price tag. That is

a tiny fraction of what they paid for it. Yeah, and at that point they were losing about forty million users a year over and all overall, and you know, you're looking at a half billion dollar loss if you're looking at how much they paid to acquire my Space versus how much they got when they sold it, and they laid off half of the employees who were still there at this point, it was looking really really ugly.

By the way, we'll talk in a second about the company that bought my Space, because that is another interesting part of this story. Before we do that, we're gonna take a quick break. So my Space get purchased for thirty five million dollars pennies on the dollar for what News Corps paid for it. Who bought it, well, a couple of people were looking at it, but the people who ended up buying it were Specific Media, and justin Timberlake, he brought Sexy back, he did, and he did not

say bye bye bye. He brought he brought Sexy back, and he bought my Space along with Specific Media. Now they were really looking at turning my Space into more of this sort of destination for a social music kind of platform where you could discover music, you could find other people who are into the same sort of music you were in. It was meant to be kind of the way my Space had originally launched, but with a

very slick redesign. But again, this happened pretty late in the game, and I don't think like I remember I went back to my Space to check it out after this happened, because I was very curious once it was redesigned, and while I thought it was a slick redesign, I could find no reason to go back frequently, and so it would only be if I just happened to think about it every few months, like I wonder what my Space looks like now. So they still are a music

and entertainment consumption site. In two thousand fifteen, Specific Media rebranded to volant Tech Ye, and then the following year, Volant tech was purchased by Time Incorporated. I love that one of the articles about this acquisition was Time accidentally buys my Space. Yes, but it was because multiple things. One they were buying the overall company, not just my Space. Two. One of the things that my Space had was still incredibly valuable, and that was the information about all the

people who had had my Space accounts. Yes, so this is when I went back to my Space to see if I could find my old account, which of course I could not, but they still have all my information what I put in there, and that know, information is valuable. Their entire companies that exist just to broker information across in order to make add deals that kind of stuff. And so really, when you look at it, the deal that Time made was not really for my Space necessarily.

It was really for the one billion registered user data base. That's what it really was about. Now you know, all this being said, all of this sadness about my Space, it is something we should note. Facebook as of this recording, is losing some of its younger user base because technology

it evolves. Yeah. Well, and also you get to a point where young people who are growing up look at a social network that seems to have all older people on it and they want something for themselves, right, They don't want to go to where all the old people are hanging out. Which is a large reason why a lot of the Facebook folks didn't have any interest in

moving over to my Space. That my Space was viewed as the place where adults in total pervert were hanging out because of this terrible reputation, so people stuck to Facebook. And then now you have you know, that was a decade ago. So now you have a different generation who says, well, I don't really going to fit moms on Facebook? Do I want to go to Facebook? Well, and there's this other thing going on where a lot of the younger generation doesn't want to put things up that can be

found forever. So you put something on Facebook, you can change your privacy settings, but largely it's in the inner space forever unless you go back and delete it. Where's something like Snapchat at least has the appearance of it deleting, although that story is more complicated than that. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, both of us have moms who are on Facebook. Yes, and also Facebook does have

their story feature, which is similar to Snapchat. You put something up, it's only there for a brief period of time, although how long that stays on a server is another question. Yes, And here are some lessons I like learning that we can learn from my Space some stuff that that really kind of sums up the issue with the braink Here. One is that they found out that focusing on monetization over user experience is a dangerous thing. And when it went to the extreme that my Space did, it ends

up hurting the business in the long run. Now, that's not to say that you can't focus on monetization. Facebook obviously did and did quite well gradually. Yeah, they kind of focused on building the social side first and then the monetization, whereas my Space sort of flipped that. Another was that the kitchen sink approach to designing and implementing new features means you're not really going to do anything. Well.

You might end up with a lot of new features, but you probably didn't make them as good as you had intended. It's going to be a frustrating experience to use them, and it may not add anything to the user experience at least nothing positive at the end of the way. And so you really need to be picky and choosy about those features and and maybe ask the

question what do the users actually want? You know, not all of us can be Steve Jobs, where we come out and tell you what you want and then you realize, oh, I do want to yes, So don't try to be Steve Jobs. If you're not Steve Jobs. Not everybody wants to go to somebody's profile and have guar blasted at them. Yeah. Also, by relying on aliases and handles that old style of the approach to the internet. MySpace made it very hard to connect with people that you actually knew. Facebook made

it very easy. So this plays into something that's social networking experts. And when I say social networking, I don't just mean online social networks, I mean you can just yeah, it could just be your friends, just your group of friends right beyond, like computers are not even involved. But social networking experts say that the Facebook approach allowed for

creating strong triadic closures, which is an interesting concept. The basic idea of a triadic closure when it comes to friends is where link gets the sword and no, that's the try force closure. The triadic closure aerial is when you see that two people have a friend in common. Right, Let's say that you and I both have a common friend, but we don't know each other yet. So ariel you have this one friend, I have that one friend, and

we're both really close with that one person. The triadic closure thought experiment goes that people who have very strong friend connections to a common friend are more likely to also become friends. Facebook's model works on that principle as well. Because I'm sure you've had this experience where you visited a person's profile and you see someone may be active on that profile. I got that person sounds interesting, and then over time you start interacting with that person and

you become friends. Right. Um. And also you find out on Facebook that the world is much smaller than you thought it was, and you'll find out that people that you know in totally different circles somehow know each other and that seems wrong. And then your brain explodes and you lay on the ground eating ice cream with a cat laying on your head for hours. Yes, so those are the lessons we've learned from my space that cats laying on your head are very good at soothing you,

and they're great therapy. And also just the thought of being too big to fail is toxic. You cannot take that philosophy to heart. I mean Facebook is always in

danger of doing that as well. And while Facebook now is larger than MySpace ever was, it's not to say that it's always going to be there, you know, it's a It's a thing that is worth remembering is that it's always possible there's another social networking site down the line, or even something totally different that we can't anticipate just now that will quote unquote take down Facebook the way

Facebook took down my Space. So fascinating story. And if you ever do a search for worst business acquisitions, the news Core MySpace one is almost always on that list. It was just it was not unfortunate, not the most expensive by any stretch of the imagination. There were bigger deals that went bad, but it was one that was just very, very high profile, and it also was one where a lot of people felt like it would be difficult to mess it up because my Space was so

far ahead when it was all happening. But there you can mess it up. Well, I'm glad we were able to revisit this. I'm sad Tom is no longer my friend. You know what, I bet he still is, just in his heart, in his heart, he is still still friends with my Space people. Well that's sweet of Tom. I appreciate that, Tom. And until next time, this has been the Brink and I have been Jonathan Stricklin and I

have been aerial casting. If you would like to learn more about what we've talked about, as well as keep track of all of our episodes, make sure you visit our website at the brink podcast dot show, or you can email us at feedback at the brink podcast Dot show.