Why myspace died

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.

This is no time to take your chips down. Unless you take bad advice. It got so bad that they even had an ad called Punch The Monkey , which invited players to click on an animated monkey only to be redirected to credit cards and other offerings if they wanted to qualify for the price. On top of that, the product lacked almost any sense of strategic direction. And those things were just rampant. Last but not least, despite claiming to be a social network, Myspace was not that social at all.

For instance, users signed up to the platform using a nickname whereas people on Facebook were incentivized to use their real name. In the end, there was no actual social graph connecting users to their actual friends and family, but instead to random strangers with potentially bad intentions.

Another major reason why Myspace failed was its hefty capital expenditure. At its peak, the company furthermore employed over 1, people, therefore indicating high staff cost. On top of that, the company had launched and operated local offices in a handful of countries like the UK and Germany — even before they were generating any meaningful revenue.

Therefore, News Corp as a profit-driven public enterprise was not able to justify clinging on to a loss-making business unit. A portion of those hefty expenditures had also to be committed to legal fees as a result of the various lawsuits the company found itself in. A couple of months later, a group of four families filed a class-action lawsuit, stating that their children were all subject to sexual abuse as well.

Apart from sexually motivated lawsuits, Myspace had to also fight multiple legal battles with regards to copyright infringements. The most prominent one was filed by Universal Music Group back in November Those lawsuits eventually trickled back all the way to the product team. Every minor change implemented on the website was accompanied by a set of News Corp lawyers to ensure legal compliance. This ultimately slowed down the speed at which decisions were made.

In comparison, upstarts like Facebook were able to operate without any intervention, allowing them to churn out new features almost on a daily basis. When Tom was released, he dabbled in a few advisory roles but did not stick around anywhere for too long.

Eventually, in , after a visit to the Burning Man festival, he became entrenched in photography after seeing his friend Troy Ratcliff snap up some shots. The event inspired Tom to travel the world and take gorgeous pictures while doing so. He documents most of that journey on his Instagram page. Myspace is currently fully owned by Viant Technology Holding Inc.

Viant itself was acquired by Time Inc in February for an undisclosed amount. Those figures are only a fraction of what News Corp. Hi folks, my name is Viktor!

By day, I lead a tech team of 10 for an e-commerce startup. At night, I work on expressing my weird thoughts through this blog.

And if there's time, I cuddle my cat.. The site arose from my fascination with how modern-day businesses utilize technology and product-led thinking to become dominant players in their industry. Email Quora Get paid to write! But today Myspace pivoted and now works as a platform for sharing music and videos showcasing the music artist and their work. They got inspired by another social media network Friendster.

Tom was a vocalist for swank, a San Francisco band and later Tom worked at xdrive technologies as an editor of the marketing department and Chris was vice president of sales and marketing at the same company. The company gets closed in so they created a company called Response base. Later that company was acquired by an internet marketing company called euniverse. On seeing the huge success of the Friendster concept they started creating their own social media network Myspace in 10 days by using a rapid web development tool called Adobe ColdFusion.

When Myspace was created the music industry was at shake. There were illegal downloads of songs all over the internet. Myspace used this opportunity to become partners with the labels to reach the content in different ways. There were attractive graphics and music all over the website where you can share your content that attracted more youngsters and artists.

Myspace was a platform where we can attain stardom over a night. Stars like Lily Allen and bands like Arctic Monkey got famous by this platform. In when Myspace was launched their only biggest competitors were Friendster and Linkedin. In Myspace surpassed Google as the most visited website on the internet.

Later in Qzone , a social media website based in china became a competitor for Myspace surpassing the number of users in Myspace. After that Myspace kept going downhill and never raised. Later Facebook became the number 1 one social media platform still holding the more number of users. Later in LinkedIn and twitter surpassed Myspace holding more users. By the year Myspace was out of the top 10 social media platforms and also out of the competition. The current competitors are Bebo, Meetup, Spotify , etc but myspace is not even near to its competitor.

Myspace makes revenue by advertising, not by the subscription-based model. It gained revenue by advertising and network marketing. The current revenue of Myspace is In Myspace had an advertising revenue of about million. In it was above million and in it had nearly million. Later it started falling and in it was less than million. In it was said that Myspace was worth about 12 billion USD. The lawyers came in, the accountants. Everything came in. Weird stuff going on on MySpace.

The result? By , MySpace was still the biggest website in terms of traffic, but Facebook was growing fast by this point, and according to Percival the atmosphere was defeatist when he joined the company. They knew that the end was near. They could smell it. Or in our case, we were doing many things kinda crappy. Percival noted that at its peak, MySpace was attracting around million monthly users — small beans compared to the 1. MySpace did try the global expansion thing, but by opening offices in as many countries as possible.

More money pouring out. The total of money lost? You could do these tree flowcharts of your website … and we did it, and it was like the fricking seven scrolls that you could see. It just went on forever and ever and ever… We were not nimble in any way, shape or form.

And those things were just rampant.