Myspace - Social Network - the epic Product Failure

What is MySpace?

• Social networking website.
• Had a significant influence on pop culture and music.
• Created a gaming platform that launched the successes of Zynga and RockYou, among others.
• Started the trend of creating unique URLs for companies and artists
• From 2005 to 2009, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world.

What's the story of Myspace?

• In August 2003, some eUniverse's employees with Friendster accounts saw potential in its social networking features, and decided to mimic the more popular features of the website. Within 10 days, Myspace was born.
• 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 starting president), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse.
• The first Myspace users were eUniverse employees. The company held contests to see who could sign up the most users. eUniverse used its 20 million users and e-mail subscribers to breathe life into Myspace, 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.
• Co-founder and CTO Aber Whitcomb played an integral role in software architecture, utilizing the then superior development speed of ColdFusion over other dynamic database driven server-side languages of the time. Despite over ten times the number of developers, Friendster, which was developed in JavaServer Pages (jsp), could not keep up with the speed of development of Myspace and cfm.
• Jan 2004 - Official Launch.
• Feb 2004 - 1M registered users.
• It rapidly gained recognition among teenage and young adult social groups.
• Nov 2004 - 5M registered users.
• In Feb 2005, DeWolfe held talks with Mark Zuckerberg over acquiring Facebook but DeWolfe rejected Zuckerberg's $75 million asking price for Facebook.
• In Jul 2005, News Corporation purchased Myspace for $580M.
• From 2005 to 2009, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world.
• In June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States.
• At its peak, when News Corp attempted to merge it with Yahoo! in 2007, Myspace was valued at $12B.
• In Nov 2007, Myspace and Bebo joined the Google-led OpenSocial alliance, which already included Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning and Six Apart. OpenSocial was to promote a common set of standards for software developers to write apps/programs/softwares for social networks. Facebook remained independent. Google had been unsuccessful in building its own social networking site Orkut in the U.S. market and was using the alliance to present a counterweight to Facebook.
• In Apr 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors, and was surpassed in the number of unique USA visitors in May 2009, though Myspace generated $800M in revenue during the 2008 fiscal year. 
• Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily in spite of several redesigns.
• In Jun 2009, Myspace employed approximately 1.6K employees. In Jun 2011, Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake jointly purchased the company for approximately $35M. Under new ownership, the company had undergone several rounds of layoffs and by Jun 2011, Myspace had reduced its staff to around 200.
• As of Oct 2016, Myspace was ranked 2154 by total web traffic, and 1522 in the USA.

Why did Myspace fail ?

• Bad-UX - Users never put up with a bad product forever no matter how strong the network effects be. The most blatant example is its layout. There is no logic to MySpace's core navigation.  There are links everywhere, and the design lends no clues as to what user should be doing.  Each page lets every element fend for itself, competing for attention and clicks.  The core navigation changes from page to page. Go to 50 Cent's page (http://myspace.com/50cent) and good luck getting back to the home page.
• They love advertisers more than they love users. They over-optimize for the advertisers' experience to the point where it's just embarrassing.  Even if you're logged in, going to myspace.com takes you to the splash page with the big ad of the day (one time, they sold an Incredible Hulk ad where the Hulk jumped out at you).  When viewing a profile, the advertisements are more prominent than the person's picture.  There are at least 3 big visual ads on every page. Their focus on advertisers has gotten in the way of innovation and staying relevant.
• Reliance on closed-source technology stack. This is not normally a problem in most companies, but in companies where the technical operations are world-class in size and scale, it becomes necessary to be able to directly develop and extend the technologies being used since the scale of the operation means that new technological grounds are constantly being broken. Closed-source OTS technology (even with direct on-site assistance from the vendor) places the company at the mercy of the vendor, who implicitly lacks as strong a motivation to solve key scalability challenges because it is not their core business (it's just another vendor, albeit an important one).  The vendor may also lack the ability to extend their technology to the scale at which it is being used, and will resist attempts to evaluate whether their technology should be replaced or re-written.
• Organizations that belong to a larger corporate parent often find themselves unable to focus squarely on strategies or actions which benefit them, because the corporate parent has other overriding priorities. One way in which this seemed to interfere with MySpace's operations is that revenue and advertising priorities set by the corporate parent (News Corporation) would cause them to take decisions that degraded the user experience or product value delivered to users.  This kept them from executing an optimal strategy to appeal to users.
• Inability to recruit top-tier talent - MySpace suffered a stigma of being a trivial entertainment-oriented site and, increasingly as time wore on, a cultural ghetto.  Also, MySpace was headquartered in Los Angeles, far from the talent center of Silicon Valley, so the available recruiting pool was that much smaller.
• Did not adapt to technological and social change as abruptly as other social networking sites such as Facebook. While Facebook was changing and reviving its entire interface and adding applications and other pioneering features to the site, MySpace failed to follow in its competitor’s footsteps. For instance, MySpace’s layout was too overbearing. According to trends, it can be inferred that social networking users prefer simple, minimal and effective approaches, while MySpace’s graphics were too large, the audio and video failed to load properly, and navigation was rather difficult to manage.
• Wrong TG - MySpace was predominantly geared towards a teenage audience, while its competitors, particularly Facebook, consistently focused on a variety of niches. Facebook was more appealing in the sense that it enabled users to easily connect and reconnect with people from around the globe, while MySpace fell short of portraying this “image” to its audience. Instead, MySpace was stagnant and was concerned with building its audience solely around music and entertainment. MySpace was geared more towards users who wished to share their personality through music, videos, images, and layout-design.
• Negative social impacts - It was incredibly easy for users to contact and find other users based on the information and photos provided on their pages. In turn, there were an influx of sex offenders, cyber-bullying people, abductors, etc. on the site who would target teens and young adults.