Fall of Myspace

Matt Illari

Integrative Business Applications

The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace

Since its peak in 2008 Myspace monthly unique viewers and U.S. advertising revenue have both been on the steep decline. "Over the past two years, Myspace has lost, on average, more than a million U.S. users a month." (p.1 TRAIFOM) according to ComScore. The main question is what caused this debacle and can it be fixed. Unfortunately, there isn't one clear cut answer as to why Myspace's popularity plummeted, but instead there is a perfect storm that slowly but surely slayed the social media giant. The three main reasons Myspace is no longer what it once was are: the website wasn't user friendly, the pornographic scare, and Facebook's emergence.

The first dilemma was the site itself. Myspace wasn't user friendly. It was slow functioning, had too much clutter from advertisers, and just had too much going on for users to feel comfortable using it. Moreover, the new products Myspace developed were often buggy which is never good. Shawn Gold said, "Myspace went too wide and not deep enough into its product development, we went with a lot of products that were shallow and not the best products in the world." (p. 5 TRAIFOM) The other main problem with the site itself was that it had way too much clutter from advertisers. People felt like they were looking more at a billboard than they were of a social network.

Next, the pornographic scare that came when Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's Attorney General, launched an investigation into minors' exposure to porn on Myspace in 2006. The last thing any parent wants is to think that their child is in some way in danger. Sexual predators are arguably more looked down upon than murderers in our society, therefore when parents heard this they were outraged. Danah Boyd said, "Myspace got to a point where they were not innovating technologically. They were having to do all technical innovations to address the various panics that are happening. Basically their development cycle turned into one of crisis management, not one of innovation." Boyd emphasizes Myspaces problems in an interview with Henry Jenkins of MIT saying, "MySpace is very open - anyone can join, participate and communicate with others. While MySpace allows 14 and 15 year old users to restrict who can see their page and contact them, most users opt to make their profiles public. The primary concern is that this openness puts youth at risk, making them particularly vulnerable to predators and pedophiles." (MIT)

Finally, Facebook, another social network began gaining more and more popularity. Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and other social networks tried to take Myspace customers, but Facebook was the most successful. Myspace tried to become more