Bought in July 2005 for US$580 million - sale nearing end today with low $30M price and buyer you never heard of
http://allthingsd.com/20110628/myspace-sale-process-drags-on-with-an-end-of-week-deal-goal/ - from Techmeme
I would love to hear what really caused this thing to collapse, although if you look at their traffic (attached) it seems rather steady. I always hear little snippets but never really understood what dismantled it. Obviously once the exodus to FB started to happen, it created a massive feedback loop.
Was it all the fake profiles? That it was more of a place to meet new people, rather than stay connected w old friends? I simply left because everyone went to Facebook. Personally, I always loved the full canvas and the personalization, better than FBs steril environment full of screwy UI/navigation.
I wouldn't dismiss the Rupert Murdoch effect on MySpace either.
I'd say the terrible design of myspace pages had an influence. Animated gifs, auto-play music and vids, 1+ mb page sizes, etc.
Though at the price I'll gladly be considered a bottom feeder.
I found myspace difficult to navigate. And the pages were horribly busy. And they scrolled forever and took 10 years to load.
I think facebook learned from that and kept a cleaner look...
myspace felt like the sites I designed back in the mid-90's on geocities. (remember geocities )
but all these teenie kids never got to experience the wonder that was geocities so myspace was born.
Going, Going, Gone! $35m to the Gentlemen at the back in the late 90's suits, and the look of desperation on their faces!
http://allthingsd.com/20110629/exclusive-myspace-to-be-sold-to-specific-media-at-35-million/
poor poor Justin
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/29/justin-timberlake-joins-myspace_n_887304.html
indeed.
135 million emails with permission to market to them and all the data about them.......for $35 million...thats a bargain
That's the problem with allowing people to fully customise their profiles - made the site unworkable.
Don't know anyone active on MySpace these days. A few on Facebook though. :)
Quote from: Drastic on June 29, 2011, 02:32:51 PM
I'd say the terrible design of myspace pages had an influence. Animated gifs, auto-play music and vids, 1+ mb page sizes, etc.
Though at the price I'll gladly be considered a bottom feeder.
Agree here - the ability for users to completely customise their pages was a killer. Friends just didn;t get "page load times" and pushed on "images and videos for all!".
Still, there's got to be some publishing revenue in the site even with normal content - a proper content publishing strategy with news and features I should imagine should work well in leveraging the domain weight.