Myspace: The Social Network That Came Before Facebook
From a side project in 2003 to the most-visited website in America in 2006, to losing 12 years of music in 2019.
By the InterStalgia history desk · November 14, 2026
In August 2003, a few employees at an internet marketing company called eUniverse were using Friendster, an early social network, and saw what it could become. They built their own version.
The beginning
The project was overseen by eUniverse's founder, Brad Greenspan. Chris DeWolfe was Myspace's first CEO and Tom Anderson its first president, working with Josh Berman and a team of programmers the company provided. Myspace let people build a profile page, add friends, and share music, photos and posts.
The biggest site in America
Myspace grew fast. In July 2005, News Corporation bought it for $580 million. In June 2006 it passed Yahoo Mail and Google Search to become the most visited website in the United States. From 2005 to 2009 it was the largest social networking site in the world, and in its 2008 fiscal year it brought in $800 million in revenue.
The site was huge in a technical sense too. In 2008 its chief systems architect said Myspace was sending 100 gigabits of data per second out to the internet, most of it videos and pictures.
The fall
Facebook's growth hit Myspace hard. In early 2011, research firm Comscore estimated that Myspace had lost 10 million users in a single month and dropped from 95 million to 63 million users over a year. In June 2011, Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake bought the company for about $35 million, a small fraction of what News Corp had paid six years earlier.
The lost music
In March 2019, Myspace revealed that a faulty server migration had wiped out everything uploaded before 2016. More than 50 million songs and 12 years of content were gone for good.
It's one of the clearest lessons of internet history: a site can be the center of the world one year and a warning about digital preservation the next. Save your stuff.