Just 4 years ago in 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp ponied up $580 million for Intermix Media, the parent company of Myspace.com.
At the time, Myspace was one of the fastest growing sites on the internet. The site had 18 million users, and was growing at a rate of around 2 million new users per month, and just a month before had surpassed Google in online market share.
They were even turning a profit, making about 6.25 million dollars in the second quarter of 2005. The future was bright.
A lot has changed in the last four years.
Facebook began in 2004 as a networking site exclusive to Harvard University Students. It spread to other Universities and High schools around the country, and in 2006, Facebook opened up to the general public and since that time has become the most popular social networking site in the US.
In June of this year, Techcrunch reported that Facebook had surpassed Myspace in monthly unique visitors in the US, and Facebook has more than doubled Myspace’s monthly unique visitors worldwide.
Here at the Flyer, I’ve found myself logging into and updating our Myspace page less and less over the past couple years, to the point that most recently I noticed that I hadn’t updated our Myspace page in over 6 months. We update on Facebook and Twitter several times a day.
In fact, I’ve found that the only time I ever visit Myspace at all is when I’m looking to link to a local band profile, (Myspace still has decent pages for bands), but with sites like Pure Volume providing a more user friendly interface and growing in popularity by the day, even Myspace band pages seem to be doomed.
Locally, more and more of my friends are announcing that they have deleted their Myspace page, and have moved to using Facebook and the recently popular Twitter exclusively for social networking.
What about you guys? Do you still use Myspace? Have you moved to Facebook or Twitter? Did News Corp waste almost $600 million dollars?
And seriously, does anyone use Myspace anymore?
