SolveYourProblem
Article Series: MySpace
I Want An Awesome MySpace Page
What
Is MySpace?
Just
like that famous bar where everyone knows your name, MySpace
is the web version of “a place for friends.” The MySpace website is free and open to anyone with access
to a computer and the Internet. The service allows old friends
to keep in touch, new friends to meet based on interests and
related friends, potential business colleagues to network,
and family to share pictures, video, and memories. How exactly
did the birth of the brainchild called MySpace come about?
Let’s find out.
MySpace has been labeled a social
networking website and has
become the fourth most popular English-language website on
the Internet. The company, which is headquartered in Santa
Monica, California, employs roughly 300 staff members and is
owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (which also owns
television giant Fox). As if to vouch for its immense popularity,
the 106 millionth MySpace.com member joined the network on
September 8, 2006 and about 230,000 new people join every day.
Prior to its use as a friends’ network, the MySpace.com domain
name was registered to an online file-sharing firm based in
San Francisco. Users could register for free and use a small
bit of disk storage space, which increased as they made referrals
to the website. The website shut down after four years due
lack of interest and revenue.
From this, Tom Anderson, MySpace’s current chief executive
officer and president, and Chris DeWolfe, along with a small
group of software engineers gave birth to the brainchild called
MySpace. The MySpace service was owned in part by Intermix
Media, which was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation
in July of 2005 for $580 million. Economic experts calculate
that roughly $327 million of the $580 million total was attributed
to the value of the MySpace service.
Anderson and DeWolfe report a relatively easy start-up for
the mega-website. According to a Forbes interview with the
two founds, they only struggled for “about a month” during
the initial ramp-up of the website. Since the company has no
content costs and no customer acquisition costs, the two merely
had to use their knowledge about the advertising business to
make enough money to pay for their low engineering and bandwidth
costs.
With all that said, the founding of MySpace has a somewhat
shady history. It seems that although the facts above are presented
as the “history” of the social networking company, few believe
that they are the true facts of the company’s inception. Some
folks credit a gentleman named Brad Greenspan as the founder
of MySpace. Greenspan was the largest individual shareholder
in Intermix Media before it was sold to News Corporation. He
alleges that MySpace shouldn’t have been sold and that the
low price agreed upon my Intermix and News Corporation was
designed to make early, major MySpace shareholders lose out.
Greenspan has been in and out of court regarding this issue
and other disagreements with News Corporation.
MySpace’s immense popularity has prompted further expansion
and future plans for service. Fox Broadcasting, a subsidiary
of News Corporation, has recently launched MySpace International,
a British version of the networking website. A Chinese version,
as well as other versions, is apparently in the works. In August
of 2006, search engine giant Google signed on to a $900 million
deal to provide a Google search engine on the MySpace website.
Many MySpace users declare that they could care less who founded
MySpace—they like how it serves their needs. Judging by the
commercial and cultural success of the company, however, it’ll
be interesting to see how the brainchild called MySpace gets
written up in the history books.
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SolveYourProblem.com
: 2008
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