Myspace wants a comeback
Toward the end of “Myspace,” the documentary that premiered at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival in April, the film’s subject stops being the platform and becomes the two men who currently own it. Chris and Tim Vanderhook, brothers, sit for the camera and say, again, that the thing is coming back.
“We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point,” Chris says, and adds, flatly, that they intend to relaunch it.
Myspace's owners have promised a comeback before. This time, they're betting the rest of the internet has finally grown tired enough of its own algorithms to want back what Myspace built by accident in 2003.
There is no date attached to that sentence. There is barely a plan attached to it. What there is, instead, is a kind of institutional stubbornness, the sound of two men who have said a version of this before and are prepared to say it again. “And if that one doesn’t work, we’ll do it again,” Tim told Fox Business.
It would be easy to file that under corporate nostalgia bait and move on, except that the Vanderhooks have earned a strange kind of credibility on the subject of Myspace’s failures, because they have presided over most of them. They bought the site in 2011, tried to remake it in 2013 and watched that attempt join a pile of earlier ones. What makes this newest promise worth a second look isn’t the brothers. It’s the field they’re stepping back into.
Every major platform Myspace would have to compete with is currently working through some version of its own crisis. X, formerly Twitter, has lost roughly half its advertising revenue since Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover; Fidelity’s own fund disclosures marked the company down by nearly 79% by the fall of 2024, implying it was worth about $9.4 billion against the $44 billion Musk paid, according to Fortune’s review of the filings.
The European Commission fined X €120 million, or roughly $140 million, last December in its first enforcement action under the EU’s Digital Services Act, after finding that X’s blue-check verification system and advertising records failed to meet the law’s transparency requirements.
TikTok, meanwhile, spent much of last year in outright limbo, briefly going dark in the US ahead of a federal ban deadline before a government-brokered sale closed in January, handing majority control of its American operations to a consortium led by Oracle, Silver Lake and the Abu Dhabi fund MGX, with ByteDance’s original algorithm licensed to the new entity rather than owned by it.
Instagram and Facebook remain by far the biggest players, but even Meta has chased the same instinct. Last year, Mark Zuckerberg told investors he wanted Facebook to feel the way it did when people saw only their friends’ updates, and the company followed through with a Friends tab that strips out algorithmic recommendations entirely. Zuckerberg’s own name for the project was “OG Facebook.” Into that unsettled field, the Vanderhooks are reintroducing a platform whose entire pitch is that it doesn’t have an algorithm left to defend.
The site’s original rise is the part of the story that still gets told with real affection. Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe built Myspace in 2003, and it became, more or less by default, the first social network most Americans used. It let people customize their pages with garish backgrounds and autoplaying songs, rank their eight closest friends in public and discover bands before anyone had a term for “discovery.”
Katy Perry and Taylor Swift built early audiences there. So did Dane Cook and Tila Tequila, in a stranger and more of-the-moment way. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign used it to reach voters who weren’t reading newspapers. By RELEVANT’s count, the platform drew roughly 115 million monthly visitors at its peak that year, before a cleaner, faster Facebook made all of it look slow.
News Corp had bought Myspace in 2005 for $580 million, a number that looked, briefly, like foresight. Rupert Murdoch’s company spent the next six years watching that bet sour as Facebook’s user base pulled ahead and never looked back; in 2009 alone, News Corp swapped out Myspace’s chief executive, installing a former Facebook executive named Owen Van Natta, who lasted less than a year before being replaced by two co-presidents instead.
By 2011, News Corp sold the site to Specific Media, an ad-targeting firm run by the Vanderhooks, for $35 million, or roughly 6% of what it had paid six years earlier. Tim Vanderhook, in the press release announcing that deal, framed Myspace as an undervalued asset with plenty of life left in it. He was already, in his own way, promising a comeback.
That first Vanderhook era ended in the same place the News Corp era had: with a platform that could not find its footing. The brothers repositioned Myspace as a music-focused site in 2013, and it didn’t take. By the time they’d taken over, the company had already burned through four sets of management, and Chris told Fox Business that too many of the people who might have carried the brand forward were done with it. RELEVANT reports the Vanderhooks have lost more than $150 million on Myspace since acquiring it, a fact that makes the current promise sound less like ambition and more like a debt they intend to keep paying off in reputation, if nothing else.
There’s a detail buried in the documentary that says more about the platform’s condition than any of the financial figures. Director Tommy Avallone, in an interview with Now Toronto, described a server migration, at some point in Myspace’s long decline, that erased years of the site’s own history. The platform, he said, still technically exists, but a great deal of what once lived on it does not; what survives is scattered and searchable mostly through the Wayback Machine. A social network built almost entirely on nostalgia lost its own archive somewhere along the way. It is hard to imagine a more literal metaphor for what happened to Myspace, and the film doesn’t appear to reach for one. It doesn’t need to.
What the Vanderhooks are proposing now is not a third attempt at being Facebook, or a second attempt at being a music site. It is something closer to an argument against the entire model both of those attempts were built on. The new pitch, as they’ve described it, involves no recommendation algorithm and no engineered infinite scroll; instead, a feed that a user actually shapes and controls.
Forrester analyst Kate Winick, speaking to CNBC, framed the appeal as nostalgia for “a more analog time” and pointed to the growth of Substack newsletters and private Discord servers as evidence that people are already moving toward smaller spaces that feel less engineered around them. Whether that same appetite extends to a platform with Myspace’s specific baggage, its dead links, abandoned profiles and reputation as a punchline, is a different question, and not one Winick or anyone else quoted by CNBC seemed willing to answer with much confidence.
There is at least one claim of early momentum, though it deserves to be read with some caution. Michael Tasner, an Inc. contributor who has written that he built his first business on Myspace years ago, reported that the platform’s user base has grown from around 200,000 to roughly 6 million over the past couple of years, a figure that comes from his own reporting and hasn’t turned up, independently confirmed, anywhere else.
CNBC’s own coverage was considerably more measured, noting that any relaunch would have to compete for attention against Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, three platforms that still hold the advertiser relationships, daily habits and regulatory footing Myspace spent the better part of two decades losing.
Not everyone greeting the news is doing so with a raised eyebrow. In dance music circles, the announcement set off a genuine wave of fondness, and for reasons that have nothing to do with feed design. Myspace hosted the earliest pages of Skrillex, deadmau5 and a long list of underground producers before streaming existed, back when a working music career could plausibly start with a well-curated profile page. That history is part of why so many people are willing to entertain the idea of a comeback at all, even the ones who don’t expect to open the app once it exists.
The Vanderhooks have been wrong about the timing before, twice, in ways that cost them money and, by their own account, a fair amount of institutional will. What they’re selling this time isn’t really a rebuilt Myspace. It’s a bet that the culture has finally caught up to the one thing the original platform got right almost by accident, before anyone had built an algorithm sophisticated enough to know better: that people would rather choose what they see than be handed it.
Whether that turns out to be true will depend on something no documentary interview can settle, which is whether nostalgia, once it’s been felt, is the same thing as a reason to come back.