MySpace

In 2006, MySpace was the most visited website in the United States, surpassing Google. It was where you discovered music, customized your profile page with garish HTML, ranked your top 8 friends (an act of social warfare), and learned that auto-playing background music was a bad idea. For a brief moment, MySpace was the internet.

News Corp acquired MySpace in 2005 for $580 million, and Rupert Murdoch's team promptly did what media conglomerates do: they focused on advertising revenue over user experience. The site became cluttered with ads, the interface stagnated, and profile customization turned pages into unloadable messes.

Facebook, with its clean design, real-name policy, and college exclusivity, offered everything MySpace didn't: simplicity. By 2008, Facebook surpassed MySpace in traffic. By 2011, MySpace had lost 90% of its users. News Corp sold it for $35 million — a 94% loss. In 2019, MySpace lost 12 years of user-uploaded music (50 million songs) during a server migration. The thing that made it matter most — the music — was accidentally deleted.