The History of MySpace

Just like that famous bar where everyone knows your name, MySpace is the web version of “a place for friends.” The MySpace website is free and open to anyone with access to a computer and the Internet. The service allows old friends to keep in touch, new friends to meet based on interests and related friends, potential business colleagues to network, and family to share pictures, video, and memories. How exactly did the birth of the brainchild called MySpace come about? Let’s find out.

MySpace has been labeled a social networking website and has become the fourth most popular English-language website on the Internet. The company, which is headquartered in Santa Monica, California, employs roughly 300 staff members and is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (which also owns television giant Fox). As if to vouch for its immense popularity, the 106 millionth MySpace.com member joined the network on September 8, 2006 and about 230,000 new people join every day.

Prior to its use as a friends’ network, the MySpace.com domain name was registered to an online file-sharing firm based in San Francisco. Users could register for free and use a small bit of disk storage space, which increased as they made referrals to the website. The website shut down after four years due lack of interest and revenue.

From this, Tom Anderson, MySpace’s current chief executive officer and president, and Chris DeWolfe, along with a small group of software engineers gave birth to the brainchild called MySpace. The MySpace service was owned in part by Intermix Media, which was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in July of 2005 for $580 million. Economic experts calculate that roughly $327 million of the $580 million total was attributed to the value of the MySpace service.

Anderson and DeWolfe report a relatively easy start-up for the mega-website. According to a Forbes interview with the two founds, they only struggled for “about a month” during the initial ramp-up of the website. Since the company has no content costs and no customer acquisition costs, the two merely had to use their knowledge about the advertising business to make enough money to pay for their low engineering and bandwidth costs.

With all that said, the founding of MySpace has a somewhat shady history. It seems that although the facts above are presented as the “history” of the social networking company, few believe that they are the true facts of the company’s inception. Some folks credit a gentleman named Brad Greenspan as the founder of MySpace. Greenspan was the largest individual shareholder in Intermix Media before it was sold to News Corporation. He alleges that MySpace shouldn’t have been sold and that the low price agreed upon my Intermix and News Corporation was designed to make early, major MySpace shareholders lose out. Greenspan has been in and out of court regarding this issue and other disagreements with News Corporation.

MySpace’s immense popularity has prompted further expansion and future plans for service. Fox Broadcasting, a subsidiary of News Corporation, has recently launched MySpace International, a British version of the networking website. A Chinese version, as well as other versions, is apparently in the works. In August of 2006, search engine giant Google signed on to a $900 million deal to provide a Google search engine on the MySpace website.

Many MySpace users declare that they could care less who founded MySpace—they like how it serves their needs. Judging by the commercial and cultural success of the company, however, it’ll be interesting to see how the brainchild called MySpace gets written up in the history books.