When Did Myspace Shut Down? The Answer, and What Really Happened

When Did Myspace Shut Down? It never formally did. The platform lost most of its users between 2009 and 2011, was sold in June 2011 for a fraction of its peak value, and continues to operate today as a music-focused content site.

A Brief Look at Where Myspace Stood at Its Peak

Myspace launched in 2003, built around customisable user profiles, social connections, and music sharing. By 2004, it had gained roughly one million users in the space of a month. By 2005, that number had grown to around 20 million registered users.

The platform offered something genuinely new at the time: users could embed music players, change background images, and code their own profile layouts using HTML.

This level of personalisation had not been widely available on a social platform before, and it drove rapid adoption among teenagers, young adults, and independent musicians. Most early social platforms of that period offered little more than a name, a photo, and a list of friends.

Peak Traffic and Cultural Reach (2006 to 2007)

In 2006, Myspace surpassed Google as the most-visited website in the United States. At its height, the platform had an estimated 115 million users.

It played a direct role in the early careers of artists including Arctic Monkeys, Lady Gaga, and The Killers, who used the platform to reach audiences before label deals or mainstream radio coverage.

The News Corp Acquisition in 2005

In 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired Myspace for $580 million, as reported by Time.

This is where most accounts of the platform's decline begin. News Corp's primary focus was advertising revenue, and that focus led to pages across the site being increasingly filled with ads.

The combination of ad density and the already-cluttered custom profile layouts produced slow, unreliable page load times. The user experience that had made Myspace popular began to erode.

When Did Myspace Shut Down? First, Why It Declined

The Myspace decline did not happen because of one decision or one competitor. Several overlapping problems compounded over three or four years.

Ad Overload and a Cluttered Interface

Investor pressure after the News Corp acquisition pushed Myspace toward aggressive advertising. Pages that were already slow due to custom HTML elements became slower and harder to use as ad units multiplied.

Users who had once spent hours customising their profiles began spending less time on the site overall. This pattern of ad revenue prioritised over user experience is one that platforms of that era repeated across multiple categories.

Facebook's Rise and a Missed Acquisition

Facebook offered a cleaner, more consistent interface. Where Myspace pages could look like almost anything, Facebook profiles followed a fixed layout.

For many users, that consistency was a feature rather than a limitation, particularly as the web became a more routine part of daily life rather than a space for experimentation.

There is a widely reported claim that Myspace had the opportunity to acquire Facebook for approximately $75 million and declined. The offer is documented, but the internal reasoning behind turning it down has never been fully confirmed publicly.

Leadership Instability

In 2009, News Corp appointed Owen Van Natta, formerly Facebook's chief operating officer, as Myspace's CEO. His first significant move was to reduce headcount from around 1,000 to 700 employees.

He left the company less than a year later, citing the slow pace of change and what he described as an entrenched internal culture.

Myspace went through several more leadership changes in the years that followed, each of which reset strategic priorities without resolving the underlying product problems.

The Google Ad Deal as a Constraint

Myspace had signed a $900 million, three-year advertising deal with Google. While this provided substantial short-term revenue, it is broadly understood to have limited the platform's flexibility to experiment with new product directions.

Facebook and Twitter were releasing new features regularly during this period. Myspace was relatively static by comparison.

Public Image Problems

Myspace began attracting negative press coverage tied to inappropriate content and safety concerns, particularly around younger users.

This accelerated the migration of users to other platforms, and it made it harder for the company to attract the kind of mainstream advertisers it needed to sustain revenue.

The Myspace Decline in Numbers (2009 to 2011)

The traffic figures from this period show how fast the fall was.

By early 2011, advertisers were pulling back from long-term commitments to the platform. The audience was shrinking too fast to underwrite sustained ad contracts.

When Did Myspace Shut Down? The June 2011 Sale Explained

In June 2011, News Corp sold Myspace to digital advertising company Specific Media for $35 million, according to Bloomberg. The contrast with the $580 million purchase price in 2005 was stark. Rupert Murdoch later said publicly that buying Myspace had been a mistake.

Time magazine compared the deal to Time Warner's 2000 acquisition of AOL: a media company overpaying to stay ahead of a wave it did not understand.

This sale is the closest thing to a definitive ending for the original Myspace. The platform did not close, but it changed hands and changed direction entirely.

Many people who remember "Myspace shutting down" are remembering this sale, or simply the moment they stopped logging in.

What Happened to Myspace After 2011

Relaunch as a Music Platform (2012 to 2013)

Specific Media repositioned Myspace as a music discovery and sharing platform. The interface was redesigned and new features were introduced for musicians and fans.

The relaunch received coverage partly because Justin Timberlake became a part-owner and a visible public advocate for the new direction.

In practice, the relaunch did not meaningfully reverse the decline in user numbers. Platform relaunches of this kind rarely do when the core user base has already migrated.

Ownership Changes: Specific Media to Viant Technology

In 2015, Specific Media was acquired by Viant Technology, and Myspace became part of Viant's broader digital media portfolio. The site's current metadata identifies it as part of the People/Entertainment Weekly Network.

Day-to-day operations and editorial direction have received limited public coverage since then, and the full picture of its current structure is not publicly detailed beyond those points.

The 2019 Data Loss

In March 2019, a server migration went wrong and Myspace lost all content that users had uploaded before 2016, as reported by TechCrunch. This included music files, photos, and videos.

The scale of the loss was significant: estimates put the number of files affected in the hundreds of millions. For many people who had used the platform in the 2000s, this was effectively the end of any archival value the site held.

Does Myspace Still Exist Today?

Yes. As of September 2026, the site is accessible at myspace.com. It publishes music news articles, with pieces appearing as recently as September 2026. Sign-up and sign-in remain functional.

The site operates as a music-focused content hub rather than a social network in any active sense.

What it no longer is: a functioning social network, a platform where users maintain active profiles, or a competitor to current social media services. Traffic figures from recent years are not publicly reported, but the site is a marginal presence by any reasonable measure.

Myspace Ownership History

What Happened to Tom Anderson?

Tom Anderson, known to most users simply as "Tom from Myspace," was automatically added as the first friend of every new account on the platform. He was one of the co-founders. Anderson sold his stake when News Corp acquired Myspace in 2005 and retired in 2009.

Since then he has maintained a low public profile, focused largely on travel photography. He appears on social media occasionally but is not involved in the platform's current operations.

Conclusion

Myspace did not shut down on a specific date. Its original era ended in June 2011 with the sale to Specific Media for $35 million. The site still exists and publishes content, but it lost its users long before it lost its domain name.

Frequently Asked Questions

When exactly did Myspace shut down?

Myspace never officially shut down. Its decline peaked in 2011 when News Corp sold it for $35 million. The site remains accessible today as a music content platform, though it no longer functions as a social network.

Why did Myspace fail?

Several factors overlapped: advertising overload after the News Corp acquisition, a cluttered and slow interface, repeated leadership changes, a restrictive ad deal with Google that limited product development, and Facebook offering a simpler alternative.

Did Myspace lose all its data?

A server migration in March 2019 resulted in the loss of all content uploaded before 2016, including photos, music, and video files. The loss is estimated to have affected hundreds of millions of files.

Can you still use Myspace in 2026?

Yes, the site is accessible and publishes music news articles. Sign-up remains available. It does not function as an active social network, and its user base is a small fraction of what it was at its peak.

Who owns Myspace now?

Viant Technology, which acquired Specific Media in 2015, is the current owner. The site operates under the People/Entertainment Weekly Network umbrella.