Before the dawn of Facebook and Twitter came the rise and fall of MySpace, a social media site launched in 2003 in Beverly Hills, California. Employees from the company eUniverse, headed by their CEO Brad Greenspan, developed the first version of the site based on a Malaysian social gaming site. MySpace allowed users to create a circle of friends and view blogs, photos, and videos. Beginning in 2005, the creation of MySpace Records allowed artists to upload their own songs and albums—and as of 2017, over 53 million songs have been uploaded.

News Corporation bought MySpace for 580 million dollars in 2005; from 2005 to early 2008, it was the most visited social networking site in the world, with 75.9 million unique visitors logging on in 2008. MySpace was the most visited website in the United States in 2006—it even attracted more visitors than Google. Its usefulness as a social site, music repository, and gaming platform attracted a wide variety of network traffic and laid the groundwork for the modern social networking sites that thrive today.

By April 2008, however, MySpace began its steady decline as competitors in the social media space such as Facebook and Twitter spiraled upward. By 2010, MySpace was operating with only half the number of users it had during its peak. As traffic declined, the company looked to cut costs by laying off employees. Whereas MySpace employed 1,600 people in 2008, by 2010, it only employed 200. In a matter of three years MySpace fell from the most visited website in America to virtual obscurity. It was sold to Specific Media for 35 million dollars in 2011—an incredibly low number considering the price it had been sold for during its heyday in 2005. Time Inc. bought the company in 2016.

Why did MySpace fall as quickly as it rose? Other social media networks continued adding new features and aspects to their sites whereas MySpace seemed to remain complacent with its reputation as an entertainment and music platform; the site’s reluctance to change with the times could have led to it becoming obsolete. Furthermore, sites like Facebook looped in outside developers to improve their quality and content; MySpace operated purely in-house, limiting the scope of their ideas to a single dimension. Despite MySpace’s inability to adapt to an evolving Internet age, it remains one of the most important sites in internet history.