Several large social media platforms have not had a good go of it in the past 2+ years and chief among them is Facebook. While they maintain a huge global user base they have been hemorrhaging young users here in the United States, which has promoted many critics of the platform to say the it is dying and will soon go the way of MySpace. In today’s exposé we will take a look at why MySpace failed and see if that is applicable to Facebook.
MySpace?
Those of you that are 30 and over probably remember MySpace. It was not the first social media platform but it was a pioneer. Its growth was meteoric and its downfall just as quick. MySpace was created to mimic the popular features of Friendster and was built in just 10 days using ColdFusion by a team of eUniverse (which became Intermix Media) employees led by eUniverse founder and CEO Brad Greenspan. Its first users were eUniverse employees and used its substantive mailing list to open the platform to the masses .
The platform was a hit with teens and young adults. It evolved beyond simple social networking to include file storage and was free thanks to paid advertising. Their first major blunder (which of course requires 20/20 hindsight) came in 2005 when CEO Chris DeWolfe held talks with the CEO of a fledgling new social media service called Facebook but balked at Mark Zuckerberg’s $75 million asking price.
Purchased By NewsCorp
MySpace seemed to be where it was at for users. Releasing a new movie? Create a MySpace account to promote it and save yourself the hassle of building a website. The same could be said for a new album or anything really. With 100 million users it was gaining momentum and seemed to be unstoppable.
Success caught the eye of other large corporations and adding MySpace to their portfolio would be quite a feather in their cap. NewsCorp won the bidding at $580 million beating out rival Viacom, who sacked their CEO as a result of their failed attempt. NewsCorp immediately took MySpace global launching versions in the UK and China with other nations following quickly. Offices were established in each of these countries to secure rights and deal with other legal issues and that cost money that MySpace in the end could not afford. The problem was MySpace now had a corporate master and had to toe the corporate line. That would have a profound effect on the company and its employees.
A Competitor is Growing
Facebook of course was becoming a viable competitor, not just to MySpace but to other social networking sites. Following the failure of Google’s Orkut they created an alliance of social networking sites to promote common standards for software developers and their programs. This alliance included MySpace and was intended to counterbalance Facebook, which was not seen as a threat as it only targeted college students by invitation at that time. By 2008 MySpace was worth around $12 billion and was the most visited website on the Internet, taking that crown in 2006.
The Decline
The decline of the platform came swift and suddenly as the site lost users by the millions. There was no one reason why the platform fell out of favor, instead it seemed to be a series of bad decisions, bad luck and the rise of serious competition. The last is fairly obvious as Facebook had opened up to the public.
MySpace’s platform was built around entertainment and music and for the most part never changed. Facebook and Twitter were continuously adding new features to improve the user experience and users liked that. MySpace had also signed a $900 million/3 year advertising deal with Google which required ads to be placed on the site, which was already overflowing with ads, and that slowed the platform down dramatically. They were tied to their design during that stretch while Facebook was free to change aspects of the platform that were not working. This may not have been MySpace’s fault but instead NewsCorps.
Then came trouble with the government. Then-Connecticut AG (and current US Senator) Richard Blumenthal launched an investigation into the potential exposure of children to pornography on the platform. The media was quick to latch on and MySpace’s inability to build an effective filter as well as the platform becoming full of malware, phishing and spam earned the platform a poor reputation. Facebook was seen as a safer platform as was another new platform called Twitter.
Rock Bottom
Blumenthal’s investigation ended MySpace’s time at the top. MySpace’s leadership group began to fall out of favor with NewsCorp CEO Rupert Murdoch and a shakeup in leadership was done. Layoffs were forced the following year as Facebook began to allow bands and others to create pages on its platform. The platform was losing millions of users per month, traffic was falling and advertisers were becoming harder to find.
With losses in the tens of millions of dollars, NewsCorps put MySpace up for sale in 2011. No one met the reserve for bidding but in June NewsCorp sold the platform for $35 million and was glad to be rid of it. The platform still exists today, mostly as a platform for music artists to share their music with the world.
Will Facebook join MySpace?
That is of course the million dollar question but for now the answer seems to be no. Both have had issues with their customer’s data (Facebook’s infamous recent past as well as MySpace’s data breach and most recently potentially losing millions of audio files in a recent server change) but Facebook is still a viable platform used by billions of people around the world. Unlike MySpace, advertisers are still willing to pay to advertise on their platform.
Facebook has also shown an ability to change the platform to make it (or at least try to make it) more user friendly and despite an infamous recent event (which we will not link to) they have mostly been able to keep content that should not be viewed by people away from them. Facebook is not the wretched hive of scum and villainy that MySpace turned into, at least not yet.
Let’s be clear, Facebook is hurting and has been rocked by a series of scandals, including another recent revelation about data harvesting. and is quickly losing the confidence of its user base. Facebook has promised change continuously but have seemingly not delivered on that promise yet, despite being dragged before numerous government bodies here in the US and abroad. This year could make or break the platform as Mark Zuckerberg has promised a privacy-based service as an improvement.
But perhaps the most important reason that Facebook will not go the way of MySpace is simple. Facebook grew into competition and eventually overshadowed them. Right now there is little in the way of true competition for Facebook that does what the platform does and Facebook’s other platform Instagram has been growing. It seems that until there is a viable rival that can provide better safeguards, a better experience and better tools than Facebook the answer to this question will be no but that does not mean that the platform’s user base should avoid holding the platform accountable for its issues. That may be the only way to force change and you can bet that Zuckerberg and company do not want to be remembered as the next MySpace.