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FT.com / Reportage - The rise and fall of MySpace

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To say MySpace was a hot property back in 2005 is something of an understatement. Its rapidly expanding tribe of users had attracted the attention of other potential buyers. Viacom, for one, a rival media conglomerate that owns companies such as Paramount Pictures and Comedy Central, was eyeing it as a vehicle to revive its flagging MTV channel, a similarly youth-oriented brand
But Murdoch got there first and the resulting $580m deal transformed his image at a stroke. The curmudgeonly media baron, whose achievements included breaking the Fleet Street printing unions and launching the conservative Fox News cable channel, had re-invented himself as a 21st-century internet hipster. It took Wall Street a few months to appreciate the magnitude of the deal but the purchase slowly began to imbue News Corp with an almost priceless commodity it had lacked: cool.
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- Millions of teenagers across the world adored MySpace, spending hours every day connecting with each other online and fine-tuning personal profile pages that reflected their tastes and personalities
- MySpace signed a three-year advertising contract with Google worth $900m – effectively paying for News Corp’s purchase
- Within 15 months of the acquisition, revenues had leapt from about $1m a month to $50m a month: half came from advertising sold by the new sales team that News Corp had installed, the rest from the Google deal
- But by the beginning of 2008, things began to sour. Facebook, a rival social network that was simpler and easier to use, was gaining momentum and starting to grow more quickly than MySpace
- Users began to desert the site, which had become cluttered with unappealing ads for teeth straightening and weight-loss products
- Since then, MySpace has shed 40 per cent of its staff, closed many of its international offices and publicly given up trying to match Facebook in the race to become the world’s biggest social network
- MySpace recently revealed that it had failed to attract enough online traffic to meet targets set in its advertising deal with Google and as a result would lose $100m this year.
- “What would you pay to get someone’s name, age, geography? With MySpace, you would also know what car they drive, what music they listened to, their favourite movie star.”
- “The MySpace guys were really freaked out that we were going to come in and turn it into Fox News.”
- Levinsohn was promoted to run Fox Interactive Media and given responsibility for MySpace. But in a sign of the problems that lay ahead, he quickly began to clash with DeWolfe and MySpace’s co-founder, Tom Anderson, two entrepreneurs who were unused to being told what to do. “I had a vision about what I wanted to do with the company and it definitely conflicted with what Chris and Tom wanted to do. I said to Peter and Rupert: ‘If you want me to run the company, let me run the company.’ I think they felt Chris and Tom were talent – and that we should have left them alone.”
- “There was always pressure [from Levinsohn’s team] to increase the number of ads per page,” he says. “If there was any pushback from MySpace then it was over that because the user experience would suffer.”
- “Tom would have an idea on a Tuesday and come in and tell his team to get building it – even if they were already working on what we were doing. They would look at us and say: ‘What do those guys know? They’re just a bunch of corporate suits.
- As long as MySpace was growing exponentially, Murdoch and Chernin seemed happy to let Anderson and DeWolfe run it how they pleased
- MySpace continued to add users at a terrific rate and was also attracting huge volumes of advertising from movie studios and consumer brands. That meant two things: one, the young team would have to learn to balance users’ and advertisers’ needs, and two, the top brass would have trouble resisting the temptation to get involved.
- With MySpace representing almost all of Fox Interactive’s revenues, the implication was clear: Murdoch thought MySpace’s meteoric rise would continue. There was only one problem: the MySpace management team had no idea Murdoch had set them a new target until he opened his mouth
- As the rivalry with Facebook intensified, MySpace staff took pride in the fact that theirs was an edgier site, with a younger demographic
- The company also prided itself on being able to respond quickly to the needs and demands of its community, but once Murdoch had set the $1bn revenue target, putting the MySpace community first became more difficult
- According to former MySpace executives, the advertising on the site was making it less compelling for users
- Meanwhile, any innovations or changes that might have cut the number of page views – and therefore advertising revenues – were likely to fall foul of News Corp.
- “We moved into too many product lines,” says one. “One week we were focused on Facebook, the next we were focused on Twitter. We weren’t choosing our own way.”
- One of the other tools that made Facebook so effective was an e-mail address importer
- “We discussed it for six months but he wouldn’t focus the team on building it. It wasn’t until Facebook launched with that feature and had several months of 40 per cent growth that we started working on it
- “When the recession hit we still needed to invest in product enhancements,” complains the ex-MySpace executive. “But the word came down from News Corp that if our revenues dropped we had to offset them dollar for dollar in cost reductions. The team became focused [on] cutting costs rather than thinking about driving the business.
- None of this was a problem while Murdoch remained deeply interested in progress at MySpace. But in 2007, two years after buying it, the man who was DeWolfe’s biggest ally became distracted by a new deal that required much of his time and attention: News Corp’s pursuit and eventual $5bn purchase of Dow Jones, the company that owns The Wall Street Journal
- “The bureaucracy crept back in when he bought the Journal [and] Murdoch became less interested in MySpace,