Myspace 1 Myspace Myspace Type Subsidiary Founded Santa Monica, California (2003) Headquarters Beverly Hills, California, U.S. Area served Worldwide Key people Tom Anderson (Co-Founder)/(ex-President) Chris DeWolfe (Co-Founder)/(ex-CEO) Owen Van Natta (ex-CEO) Mike Jones (Co-President) [1] Jason Hirschhorn (Co-President) [2] Revenue US$385 million (2009 est.) Owner News Corporation [3] Employees 1000 Slogan A Place for Friends [4] Website myspace.com IPv6 support No [5] Alexa rank 80 (May 2011) Type of site Social networking service Advertising Google, AdSense Registration Required [6] Users 34 million (March 2011) Available in 15 languages Launched August 2003 Current status Active Myspace,[7] stylized My_____[8] and previously MySpace, is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California[9] where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, News Corp. Digital Media, owned by News Corporation. Myspace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006, a position that it held throughout 2007 until 2008.[10] In April 2008, according to comScore, Myspace was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, based on monthly unique visitors.[11] [12] Myspace employs 1,000 employees, after laying off 30% of its workforce in June 2009;[3] the company does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. Quantcast estimates MySpace's monthly U.S. unique visitors at 19.7 million as of May 2011.[13] Myspace 2 History After the 2002 launch of Friendster, several eUniverse employees with Friendster accounts saw its potential and decided to mimic the more popular features of the social networking website, in August 2003. Within 10 days, the first version of Myspace was ready for launch.[14] A complete infrastructure of finance, human resources, technical expertise, bandwidth, and server capacity was available for the site, right out of the gate, so the Myspace team was not distracted with typical start-up issues. The project was overseen by Brad Greenspan (eUniverse's Founder, Chairman, CEO), who managed Chris DeWolfe (MySpace's starting CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace's Fox Interactive Media headquarters, 407 North starting president), and a team of programmers and resources provided Maple Drive, Beverly Hills, California, where Myspace is also housed. by eUniverse. The very first Myspace users were eUniverse employees. The company held contests to see who could sign up the most users.[15] The company then used its resources to push Myspace to the masses. eUniverse used its 20 million users and e-mail subscribers to quickly breathe life into MySpace,[16] and move it to the head of the pack of social networking websites. A key architect was tech expert Toan Nguyen who helped stabilize the Myspace platform when Brad Greenspan asked him to join the team.[17] The origin of the MySpace.com domain was a site owned by YourZ.com, Inc.[18] It was intended to be a leading online data storage and sharing site up until 2002. By 2004, Myspace and MySpace.com, Original logo which existed as a brand associated with YourZ.com,[19] [20] had made the transition from a virtual storage site to a social networking site. This is the natural connection to Chris DeWolfe and a friend, who reminded him he had earlier bought the URL domain, MySpace.com, intending it to be used as a web hosting site,[21] since both worked at one time in the virtual data storage business, which itself was a casualty of the "dot bomb" era. Shortly after launching the site, team member Chris DeWolfe suggested that they start charging a fee for the basic Myspace service.[22] Brad Greenspan nixed the idea, believing that keeping Myspace free and open was necessary to make it a large and successful community.[23] Some employees of Myspace including DeWolfe and Berman were later able to purchase equity in the property before MySpace, and its parent company eUniverse (now renamed Intermix Media) was bought in July 2005 for US$580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (the parent company of Fox Broadcasting and other media enterprises).[14] [24] Of this amount, approximately US$327 million has been attributed to the value of Myspace according to the financial adviser fairness opinion.[25] Myspace 3 In January 2006, Fox announced plans to launch a UK version of Myspace in a bid to "tap into the UK music scene"[26] which they have since done. They also released a version in China[27] and have since launched similar versions in other countries. The 100 millionth account was created on August 9, 2006,[28] in the Netherlands.[29] The corporate history of Myspace as well as the status of Tom Anderson as a Myspace founder has been a matter of some public dispute. Oxfam America President Raymond C. Offenheiser, Wendi Deng, On November 1, 2007, Myspace and Bebo joined the and Rupert Murdoch with MySpace co-founders Anderson and DeWolfe at the 2006 Oxfam/MySpace Rock for Darfur event Google-led OpenSocial alliance, which already includes Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning and SixApart. OpenSocial was to promote a common set of standards for software developers to write programs for social networks. Facebook however remained independent. Google had been unsuccessful in building its own social networking site (Orkut was succeeding in Brazil but struggling in the U.S.) and was using the alliance to present a counterweight to Facebook.[30] [31] [32] [33] By late 2007 into 2008, Myspace was considered the leading social networking site, and consistently beat out main competitor Facebook in traffic. At its peak, when News Corp attempted to merge it with Yahoo! in 2007, Myspace was valued at $12 billion.[34] [35] Decline Since 2008, Myspace has been in a continuing loss of membership, and there are several suggestions for its decline. One claim is that Myspace failed to innovate and stuck to a "portal strategy" of building an audience around entertainment and music, whereas Facebook and Twitter continually launched new features to improve the social-networking experience.[36] [37] A former Myspace executive suggested that the US$900 million three year advertisement deal with Google, while being a short-term cash windfall, was a handicap in the long run. That deal required Myspace to place even more ads on its already heavily advertised space, which made the site more difficult to use and less flexibility. Myspace could not experiment with its own site without forfeiting revenue, while rival Facebook was rolling out a clean site design.[38] These have been cited as factors why users, who as teens were Myspace's strongest audience in 2006 and 2007,[39] have been migrating to Facebook; Facebook which started strong with the 18-to-24 group (mostly college students)[40] has been much more successful than Myspace at attracting older users.[41] [42] [43] On April 19, 2008, Facebook overtook Myspace in the Alexa rankings.[44] [45] The site ranking of Myspace as of March 2011 was 69,[5] as opposed to the number 2 position held by Facebook.[46] Former AOL executive Jonathan Miller, who joined News Corp in charge of the digital media business, was in the job for three weeks when he shuffled Myspace's executive team in early 2009. Myspace President Tom Anderson stepped down while Chris DeWolfe was replaced as Myspace CEO by former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta.[47] [48] News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch was said to be frustrated that Myspace never met expectations, as a distribution outlet for Fox studio content, and missing the US$1 billion mark in total revenues.[49] Myspace has attempted to redefine itself as a social entertainment website, with more of a focus on music, movies, celebrities and TV, instead of a social networking website. Myspace also developed a linkup with Facebook that would allow musicians and bands to manage their Facebook profiles. CEO Mike Jones was quoted as saying that Myspace now is a "complementary offer" to Facebook Inc., which is "not a rival anymore." [35] Myspace 4 In March 2011, market research figures released by comScore suggested that Myspace had lost 10 million users between January and February 2011, and that it had fallen from 95 million to 63 million unique users during the previous twelve months.[50] Myspace registered its sharpest audience declines in the month of February 2011, as traffic fell 44% from a year earlier to 37.7 million unique U.S. visitors. Advertisers have been reported as unwilling to commit to long term deals with the site.[51] At the start of 2011, there was media speculation that Myspace Corp. will be auctioned during the year, and in late February, News Corp officially put the site up for sale. If Myspace were to be sold, it is estimated to be worth $50–200 million.[52] Losses from last quarter of 2010 were $156 million, over double of the previous year.[53] Re-design Throughout 2007 and 2008, Myspace redesigned many of the features of its site in both layout and in function. One of the first functions to be redesigned was the user home page, with features such as status updates, applications, and subscriptions being added in order to compete with Facebook. In 2008, the Myspace homepage was redesigned. Myspace Music was redecorated in 2008 and 2009, making it more like an online music store similar to iTunes and Rhapsody, along with the ability to create playlists. The use of Playlist.com on Myspace was abolished after the new Myspace music was launched. Some of the classic features of Myspace music, such as the artist directory, were also abolished.