MySpace — The King of Social Media, Sold for a Fifteenth of Its Price

MySpace was the most-visited website in America and the undisputed king of social media, and in June 2011 News Corporation sold it for roughly $35 million — about a fifteenth of what it had paid. Launched in 2003, MySpace let anyone build a loud, customizable profile, soundtrack it with music, and accumulate a public list of friends; by mid-2006 it had surpassed Yahoo Mail and Google Search to become the single most-visited site in the United States, and by late 2008 it drew around 75.9 million monthly US visitors. For three or four years it was where the internet socialized. Then Facebook arrived, did the same things faster and cleaner, and MySpace’s empire dissolved with startling speed.

The financial story is the cautionary one. In 2005, near the top of the boom, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace’s parent, Intermix Media, for approximately $580 million, an acquisition hailed as Old Media’s bold leap into the social future. Under corporate ownership MySpace was pushed hard to generate advertising revenue and starved of the engineering nimbleness it needed; its famously chaotic, customizable design curdled from a strength into a liability against Facebook’s clean uniformity. Facebook passed MySpace in US visitors in May 2009, and the decline became a collapse. On June 29, 2011, News Corp offloaded MySpace to the ad network Specific Media — with Justin Timberlake taking a stake — for a reported $35 million, booking the failure as one of the most expensive acquisition write-downs of the social era.

That fire-sale is the death this file records: the moment the dominant social network of its era was sold for pennies on the dollar, its reign over and its relevance gone. But MySpace’s most painful chapter came years after the sale. In March 2019, the much-diminished site admitted that a botched server migration had destroyed roughly 50 million songs uploaded by some 14 million artists between 2003 and 2015 — twelve years of music, photos, and video, much of it the only copy that ever existed.

The human cost of that 2019 loss belongs to the creators, not the executives. MySpace Music had been a genuine launchpad — a place where unknown bands built audiences and uploaded demos, sessions, and recordings, many never backed up anywhere else. When the files vanished, so did the early work of a generation of musicians, including recordings by people who had since died. The company that had once owned the internet’s social life ended its story by losing the one irreplaceable thing its users had given it.

Digg — The Front Page of the Web That Redesigned Itself to Death

Digg was, for most of the late 2000s, the front page of the web — the place a link went to be voted into relevance by a crowd rather than chosen by an editor — and in July 2012 what was left of it was sold to the New York firm Betaworks for a reported $500,000. Launched on December 5, 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson, Digg let users submit stories and “digg” the ones they liked; enough diggs pushed a link to the home page, where it could collapse a small website’s server under the weight of the traffic. For a few years a Digg front-page slot was one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on the internet, and the company was variously rumored to be worth a fortune.

The numbers it touched were large for the era. By 2008 Digg drew something on the order of 236 million visitors a year, and that summer it reportedly entered advanced acquisition talks with Google for around $200 million — a deal that fell through. Press accounts of its ambitions cited valuations as high as $160 million. Whatever the true figure, the trajectory only ran one way after August 25, 2010, the day Digg shipped the rewrite its own users would treat as a declaration of war.

The redesign was called v4, and it is the rare case of a social network that did not lose to a competitor so much as hand itself over to one. v4 gutted the features power users lived by, broke constantly, and — most provocatively — shifted the front page away from user-submitted links toward content pushed by big publishers. The community that had built Digg read this, accurately, as being fired from its own platform. They organized a “Quit Digg Day” and left for Reddit, which welcomed them by temporarily adding a Digg shovel to its logo.

What users lost was a place they had genuinely made: a culture, an in-joke-rich sensibility, a sense that the crowd, not a media company, decided what mattered. By the time Digg sold in July 2012, its monthly unique-visitor count had fallen roughly 90 percent from its peak. Betaworks bought the brand for a sum that, against a rumored $160 million, read as an epitaph. Digg survives today as a quiet, rebuilt link site — but the Digg that mattered ended itself on a Wednesday in August 2010.