The owners of MySpace have announced a plan to bring MySpace back. This is not the first time they have announced a plan to bring MySpace back. It is, however, the first time they've announced it via documentary, which is a bold choice for a company whose main product is a website nobody has opened since the Obama administration.
Meet the Two Guys Who Own MySpace (Yes, Someone Owns MySpace)
Brothers Tim and Chris Vanderhook own MySpace. You probably did not know that. Almost nobody does. That is, in a single sentence, the entire problem.
According to the New York Post, the Vanderhooks have announced plans to relaunch the platform with what they're calling a "new vision." The brothers say they want to build something that feels different from today's social media giants, less algorithmic, less designed to trap you in a scroll loop until 2 a.m. A noble goal. A very familiar pitch. A pitch that multiple companies have been making, with varying degrees of failure, for the better part of a decade.
The kicker is that this is not actually their first attempt. The Vanderhooks already tried to modernize MySpace. That didn't work either.
The Documentary Nobody Asked For, About a Website Nobody Uses
The relaunch announcement came via a new documentary, simply titled "Myspace," in which Tim Vanderhook explains their previous revamp attempt with the kind of philosophical calm a man develops after losing a lot of money. "We really tried to modernize it, but it was a different company at that point. It wasn't the same Myspace," he says in the film.
Chris Vanderhook adds some context: by the time they took over, the platform had already cycled through four different management teams and four different CEOs. The Vanderhooks were going to be the fifth. "I think that there were a lot of the people who were really just done," he said. Which is what therapists call "burying the lede."
The documentary exists. It was made. Someone funded it. These are facts about the current state of the world that you are now aware of.
A Brief History of Getting Lapped by a College Kid in a Hoodie
Let's be fair to MySpace for a moment, because it genuinely was something. The New York Post reports the platform launched in 2003 and became one of the biggest social networks on earth, with customizable profiles, music integration, and the now-legendary Top Friends list, which caused more middle school breakups per capita than any technology before or since.
Between 2005 and 2008, MySpace was the king. It and Facebook were pulling roughly 115 million visitors a month each in 2008. Then Facebook surpassed MySpace in global traffic. Then it took over in unique US visitors in 2009. Then came what the Post generously describes as a "mass exodus" in 2010, which is the kind of event that sounds dramatic but basically just meant everyone quietly stopped showing up.
Facebook never looked back. MySpace never caught up. Tom Anderson, the co-founder who was everyone's automatic first friend and the man who sold the company back in 2005, has not posted on the platform in 13 years. The site still technically exists, in the way that a closed restaurant still technically has a building.
The Plan, Such As It Is
The Vanderhooks have not set a target launch date for the new MySpace. There is no announced timeline. No technical details. No roadmap made public. What there is, per the New York Post, is Tim Vanderhook's ironclad contingency planning: "And if that one doesn't work, we'll do it again."
Say what you want about the man, he is not a quitter. Whether that's inspiring or the specific psychological profile of someone who should maybe talk to someone, we leave to the reader.
Tom Anderson, meanwhile, is not expected to be involved.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to look at this story and feel inspired by the scrappy entrepreneurial spirit of two brothers who believe in something the market has rejected, repeatedly, across twenty years of technological change. That is one way to read it.
Here is another way. MySpace lost to Facebook in 2009. Facebook then proceeded to become one of the most reviled companies in American life, accused of destroying democracy, warping teenage girls' self-image, and making your uncle into a completely different and worse person. And MySpace still lost to that. It lost to the thing everyone hates. Multiple competitors have since tried to offer "less algorithmic" social media as an alternative to the platforms people complain about constantly, and those alternatives have also struggled to pull users away from the platforms they complain about constantly. People are complicated.
The Vanderhooks might be onto something real about what users want. The frustration with scroll-bait algorithm hellscapes is genuine, and someone is going to figure out how to monetize the backlash eventually. But "we built an entirely new MySpace and it didn't work, so we're going to build another one, and if that doesn't work we'll build another one" is not a business plan so much as it is a definition of insanity with a PR strategy attached. Tom Anderson is out there somewhere, presumably taking photographs of something nice, and he is not involved. That man knows something.
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