If you’re of a certain age, you remember the "Top 8" anxiety. You remember staying up until 2:00 AM tweaking the CSS of your profile just so a sparkly cursor followed your mouse. You remember Tom.
What happened to Myspace isn’t just a story about a website dying. Honestly, it’s a story about how a $12 billion empire turned into a digital ghost town. It was the center of the universe in 2006. By 2011, it was the punchline of every joke on the internet.
Most people think Facebook just "showed up" and Myspace vanished. That’s not quite right. It was a slow-motion car crash involving Rupert Murdoch, Justin Timberlake, and a catastrophic server migration that basically nuked a decade of internet history.
The News Corp Era: Where It All Started To Rot
In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought Myspace for $580 million. At the time, it looked like the heist of the century. Myspace was beating Google for traffic. It was the "cool kid" table of the internet.
But News Corp was a traditional media company. They didn’t understand that a social network is a living thing, not an ad billboard. They saw a cash cow.
They flooded the site with ads. Remember those "Punch the Monkey" banners? They were everywhere. The site got bloated. It got slow. While Facebook was keeping things clean and "exclusive" with college emails, Myspace was becoming a cluttered mess of auto-playing music and spam.
The $900 Million Trap
To make back their investment, News Corp signed a massive search and ad deal with Google in 2006. It was worth $900 million. Sounds great, right?
Actually, it was a death sentence.
The deal forced Myspace to cram even more ads onto pages to meet revenue targets. This made the site's tech debt explode. Because they were using a platform called ColdFusion, the site struggled to scale. It was buggy. It crashed. You’d try to load a friend’s profile, and your browser would just hang.
Why Facebook Actually Won
It wasn't just about the ads. It was about the "Social Graph."
Facebook understood that you wanted to see what your real-life friends were doing. Myspace was built on "pseudonyms" and "band pages." You could be "Xx_Emo_King_xX" on Myspace. On Facebook, you had to be yourself.
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Facebook also opened its doors to outside developers. They let people build games like FarmVille. Myspace tried to build everything in-house. They launched "Myspace Books" just because a publisher paid them to, not because users wanted it.
By 2008, Facebook’s global user base finally overtook Myspace. The cool kids had moved to the new house, and they weren't coming back.
The Justin Timberlake "Revival"
In 2011, News Corp gave up. They sold Myspace for a measly $35 million—less than 10% of what they paid for it. The buyer? Specific Media and pop star Justin Timberlake.
Timberlake wanted to pivot the platform back to its roots: Music.
They launched a "New Myspace" in 2013 with a fancy horizontal-scrolling interface. It looked like a high-end music magazine. It was actually kind of beautiful. But it was too late. People were already using Spotify for music and Instagram for photos. The "New Myspace" felt like a museum for a culture that had already moved on.
The 2019 "Digital Lobotomy"
If you’ve tried to log in recently to find your old "cringe" photos, you might have noticed something heartbreaking. Most of them are gone.
In March 2019, Myspace admitted that during a server migration, they lost almost all content uploaded before 2016.
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- Over 50 million songs.
- Millions of photos.
- A decade of blog posts.
Poof. Gone forever. Some tech experts, like Andy Baio, speculated that it might not have even been an accident. Maintaining 50 million old MP3s is expensive. Whether it was "flagrant incompetence" or a quiet cost-cutting move, the result was the same: the 2000s era of the internet was effectively erased.
Where is Tom Now?
The one guy who really won was Tom Anderson.
"Myspace Tom" sold the company at the perfect time. He retired in 2009 at age 39 with a net worth estimated around $60 million. Today, he’s a travel photographer. If you look at his Instagram (@myspacetom), he’s basically living the dream—surfing in Oahu, flying drones in the Philippines, and taking gorgeous landscape photos.
He’s arguably the most successful person to ever leave social media. He took the money and actually left.
Does Myspace Still Exist in 2026?
Technically, yes. You can go to Myspace.com right now. It’s owned by Viant Technology (which was spun off from Meredith Corporation).
It’s essentially a music news aggregator. It looks like a hybrid of a blog and a streaming site. There are still active profiles, but it’s mostly bands and "super-fans." It’s a niche site for entertainment news, far removed from the cultural titan it once was.
Actionable Takeaways from the Myspace Fall
If you’re a creator or a business owner, there are real lessons here.
- Don't Build Your House on Rented Land: If you only exist on one platform, you are at the mercy of their "server migrations." Always have a backup of your data and your own website/email list.
- User Experience Over Ad Revenue: Short-term greed (like the $900M Google deal) kills long-term growth. If your product is hard to use, people will leave the second a "cleaner" version exists.
- Identity Matters: The shift from "anonymous screen names" to "real identities" changed the internet. People value authentic connection over curated personas.
Myspace didn't just disappear because of a better competitor; it collapsed under the weight of its own bad decisions and corporate bloat. It serves as a permanent reminder that in tech, no matter how big you are, you're only a few years of stagnation away from being a "server migration error."