Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Reuters
In 2003, UCLA dropout and former punk singer Tom Anderson and marketing executive Chris DeWolfe co-founded MySpace, the best social media website ever. By 2005, MySpace had overcome Google to become the most popular website in the world, and was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580 million.
Murdoch immediately struck an advertising partnership with Google for $900 million over three years. But the site began to buckle under the weight of the deal, as well as underlying infrastructure that badly needed an update. As the website became slow to load and filled with spam, users began to flee and Murdoch’s predictions that the site would generate $1 billion in revenue proved to be incorrect. Facebook overtook MySpace in 2008, and DeWolfe and Anderson left the following year.
Murdoch brought in new leadership to right the ship. They had their work cut out for them.