Marcus White, Taryn Varricchio, Carlee Murray, Brittany Stephanis, and Lauren Bailey

myspace: growth, collapse, & reinvention

Outline• Background

• Rise

• Collapse

• Reinvention

• Lessons Learned

• Q&A

“the history of the web is littered with the debris of ‘could-have-beens’ like friendster. the lesson is clear: there is no room for arrogance online. more so than in any other channel, complacency in this space is commercial suicide.”

- unknown (marketing mag, 2008)*

background• Friendster - first successful social network (Bennett,

2013)

• 2003: Google offered to buy Friendster for $30 million

(Marketing Mag, 2008)

• 2003: Myspace founded by four employees of an internet

marketing company then called eUniverse (Stenovec, 2011)

background• 2004: Myspace took over, Friendster started to fall

(Marketing Mag)

• Myspace became a pioneer for influencer marketing

(Dredge)

• Established the concept of making “friends” online

(Bennett)

rise• Distinguishing Features

• Free (Fishkin, 2006)

• Easy to use (Fishkin)

• Share personal information with others (Fishkin)

• Design own layout (Clements, 2014)

• Profile song (Clements)

• Top Friends (Clements)

• Demographic: 16-21 (Fishkin)

rise• June 2004: Record-breaking

• Over one million visitors per month (Jackson & Madrigal, 2011)

• January 2005: Exponential Growth

• Gained millions of members in the new year (Jackson & Madrigal)

• December 2008: Peak

• 75.9 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. (Gillette, 2011)

Figure 1. Myspace vs. Facebook. (Dossett, 2015)

“People are online right now. We want our piece of it. It’s really hard to say, but I’m hoping that we’re, you know, 2, 3, 400 million, that we can expand into all these markets” - Tom ANderson, 2009 (Rao, 2009)

Collapse• April 2008: FB overtook Myspace globally (Stenovec)

• 2009: Myspace still biggest in terms of traffic (Dredge)

• April 2009: Co-Founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe

step down (Lee, 2011)

• November 2009: Myspace spends $1 million a month for

space they never move into (Jackson & Madrigal)

• Jan 2011: Myspace lays off about 50% of staff (Stenovec)

collapse • Corporate policies slowed growth down (Dredge, 2015)

• Threw money around to try to compete with Facebook

• Bloated with too many different things, Facebook was only

doing one thing

• All about making money- added spammy advertisements with

no regard for the user

“I don’t want Myspace to be who I was last night through a bunch of drunken pictures in a drunken stupor, and I don’t want it to be who I am right now on what I’m typing on the Internet...I want it to constantly be about who I’m going to be, what I have to offer the next day.”-Justin Timberlake (Warner, 2012)

ReinventionFigure 2. Justin Timberlake speaks at Consumer Electronics Show (Miller, 2012)

reinvention• Summer 2011: Timberlake, Specific Media Group purchase

MySpace for $35M

• “In a single sentence, it’s a social network for the creative community to connect to their fans.”-Tim Vanderhook, Myspace CEO (Baltin, 2012)

• “The [music] player persists across every page as if to

say, ‘You’re on Myspace for the music.’” (Peterson, 2013)

Figure 3. Myspace’s growth from December 2013-December 2014. (Lella & Lipsman, 2015)

“Facebook has done a really good job of not doing that … Lesson learned: do one thing great, not do many things good. Or in our case, we were doing many things kinda crappy.”- Sean Percival, 2015 (Dredge, 2015)

Lessons Learned What went wrong?

• Things got too corporate-- “Politics, greed all the

horrible things that came with big corporations slowly

crept in” - Sean Percival (Dredge, 2015)

• Too much money spent-- “I’m pretty sure that in every

market we lost money…” -Percival (Dredge)

• Not enough direction-- “The site was such a massive

spaghetti-ball mess.”-Percival (Dredge)

q&a

Reference ListA Brief History Of 7 Social Networks (And How They Used To Look) [PHOTOS]. (n.d.). Retrieved December 17, 2015, from http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/social-networks-early-history/493734

Baltin, S. (2012, September 24). Justin Timberlake's MySpace Gears Up for Relaunch. Retrieved December 15, 2015, from http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/earshot/justin-timberlake-myspace-vanderhook-lauch-373752

Clements, S. (2014, June 5). 10 Reasons MySpace Was The Best Social Network Ever. Retrieved December 17, 2015, from http://whatculture.com/offbeat/10-reasons-myspace-was-the-best-social-network-ever.php/11Dredge, S. (2015, March 6). MySpace – what went wrong: ‘The site was a massive spaghetti-ball mess’. Retrieved December 15, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/06/myspace-what-went-wrong-sean-percival-spotify

Dosset, M. (2015, July 1). Rise and Fall of Myspace is A Lesson for Facebook: Retrieved December 17, 2015. from https://letschatbusiness.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/myspace-v-facebook-bbw.jpg

Fishkin, R. (2006, July 27). A Simple Explanation for Why MySpace is So Successful. Retrieved December 17, 2015, from https://moz.com/blog/a-simple-explanation-for-why-myspace-is-so-successful

Gillette, F. (2011, June 22). The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace. Retrieved December 17, 2015, from http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/11_27/b4235053917570.htm#p2

Reference List, Cont’dLee, A. (2011, June 30). Myspace Collapse: How The Social Network Fell Apart. Retrieved

December 15, 2015, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/30/how-myspace-fell-

apart_n_887853.html

Lella, A & Lipsman, A. comScore. (2015, March 26). 2015 U.S. digital future in focus.

Reston, Virginia: comScore.

Madrigal, A., & Jackson, N. (2011, January 12). The Rise and Fall of MySpace. Retrieved

December 15, 2015, from http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/the-

rise-and-fall-of-myspace/69444/

MySpace vs Friendster: The curse of complacency - Marketing Magazine. (n.d.). Retrieved

December 17, 2015, from https://www.marketingmag.com.au/hubs-

c/myspacevsfriendsterthecurseofcomplacency/

Miller, E. (2012, January 9). Recording-Artistactor-Justin-Timberlake-Appears-During-a-

Panasonic-Picture. Retrieved December 15, 2015 from

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/recording-artist-actor-justin-

timberlake-appears-during-a-news-photo/136647193

Reference List, cont’dO'Reilly, L. (2015, September 15). MySpace has undergone a 'surprising renaissance' and

now it's going after teens. Retrieved December 15, 2015, from http://www.businessinsider.com/myspace-ceo-tim-vanderhook-interview-2015-9

Peterson, T. (2013, October 1). MySpace's Music-Centered Relaunch Turned Up Volume, But Is Anybody Listening? Retrieved December 15, 2015, from http://adage.com/article/special-report-music-and-marketing/myspace-relaunch-turned-volume-listening/244361/

Rao, L. (2009, February 4). Charlie Rose: The MySpace Interview. Going After Small Business. Retrieved December 15, 2015, from http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/04/charlie-rose-the-myspace-interview/

Stenovec, T. (2011, August 29). Myspace History: A Timeline Of The Social Network's Biggest Moments. Retrieved December 15, 2015, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/29/myspace-history-timeline_n_887059.html

Warner, K. (2012, November 16). Justin Timberlake Explains New Myspace -- And What It Means For His Music. Retrieved December 15, 2015, from http://www.mtv.com/news/1697512/justin-timberlake-new-myspace-music