Myspace
Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace; also myspace and sometimes my␣, with an elongated open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it was the first social network to reach a global audience and had a significant influence on technology, pop culture and music.[2] It also played a critical role in the early growth of companies like YouTube[3] and created a developer platform that launched the successes of Zynga, RockYou and Photobucket, among others.[4] From 2005 to 2009, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world.[5][6]
Type of business
August 1, 2003
United States
Worldwide
Viant Technology LLC
- Chris DeWolfe
- Tom Anderson
- Jon Hart
- Tim Vanderhook (CEO)
- Chris Vanderhook (COO)
150[1]
Required
August 1, 2003
Active
In July 2005, Myspace was acquired by News Corporation for $580 million[7] and, in June 2006, it surpassed Yahoo! and Google to become the most visited website in the United States.[8][9] It generated $800 million in revenue during the 2008 fiscal year.[10] At its peak in April 2008, Myspace and Facebook reached 115 million monthly visitors, but Myspace narrowly lost to the newly emerging Facebook in terms of global users.[11] In May 2009, Facebook surpassed Myspace in its number of unique U.S. visitors.[12] Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily despite several redesigns.[13] By 2019, the site's monthly visitors had dropped to seven million.[11]
In June 2009, Myspace employed approximately 1,600 employees.[14][15] In June 2011, Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake jointly purchased the company for approximately $35 million.[16] On February 11, 2016, it was announced that Myspace and its parent company had been purchased by Time Inc. for $87 million.[17][18] Time Inc. was in turn purchased by Meredith Corporation on January 31, 2018.[19] On November 4, 2019, Meredith spun off Myspace and its original holding company (Viant Technology Holding Inc.) and sold it to Viant Technology LLC.[20]
Corporate information[edit]
Foreign versions[edit]
Since early 2006, Myspace has offered the option to access the service in different regional versions. The alternative regional versions present automated content according to locality (e.g., UK users see other UK users as "Cool New People", and UK-oriented events and adverts, etc.), offer local languages other than English, or accommodate the regional differences in spelling and conventions in the English-speaking world (e.g., United States: "favorites", mm/dd/yyyy; the rest of the world: "favourites", dd/mm/yyyy).
MySpace Developer Platform (MDP)[edit]
On February 5, 2008, MySpace set up a developer platform allowing developers to share their ideas and write their own Myspace applications. The opening was inaugurated with a workshop at the MySpace offices in San Francisco two weeks before the official launch. The MDP is based on the OpenSocial API, which was presented by Google in November 2007 to support social networks to develop social and interacting widgets, and can be seen as an answer to Facebook's developer platform. The first public beta of the MySpace Apps was released on March 5, 2008, with around 1,000 applications available.[106][107]
Myspace server infrastructure[edit]
At QCon London 2008,[108] MySpace Chief Systems Architect Dan Farino indicated that the site was sending 100 gigabits of data per second out to the Internet; 10 gigabits of which was HTML content and the remainder was media such as videos and pictures. The server infrastructure consists of over 4,500 web servers (running Windows Server 2003, IIS 6.0, ASP.NET and .NET Framework 3.5), over 1,200 cache servers (running 64-bit Windows Server 2003), and over 500 database servers (running 64-bit Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005), as well as a custom distributed file system which runs on Gentoo Linux.
In 2009, MySpace began migrating from HDD to SSD technology in some of their servers, resulting in space and power usage savings.[109]
Revenue model[edit]
Myspace operates solely on revenues generated by advertising, as its revenue model possesses no user-paid features.[110] Through its site and affiliated advertising networks, the site collects data about its users and utilizes behavioral targeting to select the ads each visitor sees.[111]
On August 8, 2006, search engine Google signed a $900 million deal to provide a search facility and advertising on MySpace.[112][113][114]
Third-party content[edit]
Companies such as Slide.com and RockYou were all launched on Myspace as widgets providing additional functionality to the site. Other sites created layouts to personalize the site and made hundreds of thousands of dollars for its owners, most of whom were in their late teens and early twenties.[115][116]
In November 2008, MySpace announced that user-uploaded content infringing on copyrights held by MTV and its subsidiary networks would be redistributed with advertisements to generate revenue for the companies.[117]
