Skip to main content

Former MySpace CEO explains why MySpace lost out to Facebook so badly

former myspace ceo reveals what facebook did right to dominate social media
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Remember MySpace? The one-time, huge social networking site that got to the scene ahead of Facebook, but eventually lost big to Facebook and other social media sites?

At the height of its popularity, MySpace was the most popular site in the entire U.S.; in July 2006, MySpace was ahead of both Google and Yahoo Mail. That dominance, however, didn’t last very long, as Facebook overtook MySpace in the number of American users by June 2009.

One man who thinks he knows how MySpace snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, in spite of its one-time lead, is Mike Jones, formerly the head of MySpace. Jones tells Business Insider he believes that Facebook was able to overtake MySpace because Facebook “perfected” the social networking concept, whereas MySpace just introduced people to it.

More specifically, Jones opines that MySpace put up barriers to user enjoyment by forcing members to use anonymous pseudonyms in place of their real identities. Facebook, on the other hand, encouraged members to actually use their real names; once this behavior was ingrained in the public, and people saw that it wasn’t the huge risk it was made out to be, Facebook took off and never looked back This significant difference between the two social networking sites proved to be a huge game changer in the two companies’ experiences.

Whereas Facebook today is the number one social media site, MySpace languishes in near-obscurity as a shadow of its former self – a victim of bad decision-making from its leadership. Today, just 50 million people even visit MySpace per month, and while that may not seem like a small number, compare that to how many people visit Facebook each month: 1.44 billion users, as of March 31, 2015.

Editors' Recommendations

Marc Schenker
Marc Schenker is a copywriter who's an expert in business and marketing topics like e-commerce, B2Bs, digital marketing and…
WhatsApp now lets you send self-destructing voice messages
WhatsApp logo on a phone.

If you’re on WhatsApp and regularly make use of the view once feature for photo and video messages, then you might be interested to learn that the feature has now been expanded to voice messages.

WhatsApp’s view once feature does what it says, deleting a message after it’s been viewed a single time. It’s been available for photos and videos since 2021, but now you can also send voice messages that can only be played once before they, too, disappear from the app.

Read more
X rival Threads could be about to get millions of more users
Instagram Threads app.

Threads -- Meta’s rival to X, formerly Twitter -- has just launched in the European Union (EU), a market with nearly half a billion people.

The app launched in the U.S. to much fanfare in July, with Meta hoping to attract X users disillusioned with the turbulence on the platform since Elon Musk acquired it for $44 billion 14 months ago.

Read more
X (formerly Twitter) returns after global outage
A white X on a black background, which could be Twitter's new logo.

X, formerly known as Twitter, went down for about 90 minutes for users worldwide early on Thursday ET.

Anyone opening the social media app across all platforms was met with a blank timeline. On desktop, users saw a message that simply read, "Welcome to X," while on mobile the app showed suggestions for accounts to follow.

Read more