The launch of Myspace Music was supposed to herald a new era of collaboration among internet platforms and established media companies who, for instance, had sued startups like Napster into oblivion , but ended up becoming a side note at best. The product was extremely buggy and, above all, almost impossible to find on the website. Trying to salvage the sinking ship, News Corp decided to strip DeWolfe and Anderson of their leadership duties.
Unfortunately, by that time, it was already too late. Before too long, other platforms like Twitter began taking over Myspace as well. Less than a year after joining the company, in February , Van Natta already abandoned Myspace again. At the beginning of , in January, Myspace via News Corp led go of another employees, which was widely considered the final nail to its coffin.
Then, in January , Myspace relaunched with the help of Justin Timberlake. To celebrate the relaunch, Timberlake released a new single his first since as well.
Over the coming years, Myspace continued to simply exist without much public attention. The platform popped back into headlines in February when Specific Media now called Viant Technology was acquired by Time Inc, thus changing ownership once again. A few months later, in May, the news cycle on the platform was less positive. Then, in March , news broke out again, stating that Myspace had accidentally deleted over 50 million digital files including photos, songs, and videos in a server migration.
Almost all data up to was gone for good, marking an end to a meaningful internet era. After a worldwide outage in October , that took down Facebook and associated its services like Instagram and WhatsApp , people around the globe posted memes and wishes about wanting Myspace to return. Tom Anderson, who himself is rarely active on social media these days, had this to say about the outage:.
These days, Myspace is a mixture between a lifestyle news site publishing content on music and film as well as a social network promoting up-and-coming artists. One of the major factors why Myspace failed was the competition it faced — both within its home market of the United States as well as abroad. Facebook started to burst onto the scene around Up until September , Facebook was only available to college students and teens.
After it opened itself up to the wider population, its growth literally exploded. Furthermore, Myspace faced competition from many local social networks in the other countries it was operating in. Apart from Facebook, Twitter also quickly began to pick up some of its users after launching in July The competition only became relevant because the product experience that Myspace was offering was subpar at best.
For once, the Myspace website was just extremely hard to navigate. There were thousands of pages with limited or no content at all apart from the ads, obviously. Furthermore, Myspace was not only bombarding its users with tons of display ads, those ads also looked extremely spammy and sketchy.
Started as a spin-off of Friendster, it grew rapidly to become the most popular social networking site before Facebook entered the scene. It gained 1 million users in about one month after it was officially launched in and by it had 20 million registered users.
Upon registration on the site, users were given profile pages they could personalize, write posts or blogs, connect with others through comments or messages, share art, stream their own music or that of their favorite artists. The platform principally made profits by serving ads to its users which reached about 76 million in Feel lost when doing customer interviews?
Cesar Cadenas is one of the newest writer at ScreenRant, helping a bring in a new take on events and topics. Cesar's has written on a ton of different topics from gaming to movies and even Kpop. By Cesar Cadenas Published Nov 21, Share Share Tweet Email 0. Related Topics Tech Internet. Cesar Cadenas 19 Articles Published Cesar Cadenas is one of the newest writer at ScreenRant, helping a bring in a new take on events and topics.
Myspace had a clumsily designed interface that could easily confuse, and many of its apps and features were faulty. Myspace was behind in technology from early on. Its strengths lay in its marketing. Later on, they attempted to fix this with a redesigned interface and allowing third-parties to design software, but it came as too little, too late. Myspace was designed and run by marketing people , and their view of what social media could be was very different from those of the people running Facebook.
Myspace then made the mistake of ignoring Facebook, thinking it was just another imitator. Later on, it attempted to rebrand as a music platform, but again this came too late.
If a startup is to be successful, it must focus on the customers, rather than obsess over the competition. However, it is still important to be aware of the landscape in which your product exists. Myspace failed at both of these aspects. Myspace became a haven for corporate spamming and junk mail. Myspace was ineffective at policing this, while Facebook was aware of this problem from the beginning and built safeguards into the software to protect from it.
Facebook separates individuals, groups, and pages, allowing businesses to set up pages under their names and act as businesses rather than people. If a person is seen as promoting a business, they are marked as spam and can potentially be cut off from the platform. The interface on Myspace was an issue from the beginning.
There were multiple redesigns between and in an attempt to fix bugs and make the website less complicated to use. This confused users even further. The switch to becoming more music-focused came in when it became clear that Facebook could not be matched. Myspace was heavily focused on giving users the ability to customize their profiles. This, in theory, is a good idea.
However, in practice, this was fiddly and required users to know HTML to change anything. This was a big factor in the migration of users over to the simpler, cleaner Facebook. Due to the only source of profit being from advertisements, Myspace was aggressive in its placement of ads.
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