Myspace Owners Plan Relaunch After Selling Site For $35 Million

For anyone who spent hours customizing their Myspace page and ranking their Top 8 friends, the news of a planned comeback will be welcome. Brothers Chris and Tim Vanderhook have revealed these intentions after acquiring the social media platform for thirty-five million dollars in 2011. They confirmed the move during a new documentary titled Myspace that explores the meteoric rise and sudden fall of this pioneering network.

Tim stated clearly while speaking to People magazine, We still own Myspace. He added that they are stewards of the brand at this point and intend to relaunch it. The brothers explained they are waiting for the right time to do it. If that first attempt does not work, they will try again.

While the announcement may be music to millennials ears, the owners have not revealed a launch date or development timeline yet. No details exist regarding which classic features could return either. Launched by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in 2003, Myspace became the worlds largest social network before Facebook overtook it in 2008. Users carefully ranked friends in a public Top 8 list and selected songs that automatically played on their profiles.

News about the relaunch quickly spread online with one user saying nobody today is emotionally stable enough to handle the return of the Top 8 friend list. Many questioned if they would be able to access their old accounts from years ago or hoped it would have an old-school feel while leaving out algorithms. Myspace has remained online despite its dramatic decline with successive owners repeatedly attempting to restore its popularity.

After acquiring the platform in 2011, the brothers spent two years transforming it into a music-centered service but the redesign failed to win back users. Chris explained in the doc that they built an entirely new Myspace while Tim added they really tried to modernize it but it was a different company at that point. It was not the same Myspace people remember from before.

Before Tim and Chris took over, News Corporation bought it for five hundred eighty million dollars in 2005 and sold it three years later to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake for thirty-five million. Chris said there were a lot of people who were really just done with the site. He explained that the minute the deal closed, things just started unraveling and everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

The brothers attempted revival suffered a major blow when every advertiser reportedly canceled its contract because brands favored Facebook over Myspace. As Tim put it, It became just an onslaught of losses for them to manage alone. But for those who came of age in the 2000s, Myspace was far more than another social network and shaped how they presented themselves online.

The platform also became a powerful launchpad for emerging musicians including Adele whose career gained momentum after her friend Lyndon uploaded one of her demos to the site. She affectionately called him Mr Myspace UK while noting she was on it from New Year's Eve 2004 and it blew up because of Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys. My best friend Jack was in Lilys top friends, Lily was huge, and then I got spotted like that, Adele told E! News in 2008. That was literally it for her breakthrough moment on the site.