MySpace is preparing for another comeback. The platform’s current owners, brothers Chris and Tim Vanderhook, say they are actively working to relaunch the once-dominant social network, positi
MySpace is preparing for another comeback. The platform’s current owners, brothers Chris and Tim Vanderhook, say they are actively working to relaunch the once-dominant social network, positioning it as an alternative to the algorithm-heavy feeds that have come to define platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
The Vanderhooks argue that today’s social media landscape has drifted too far from genuine human connection, with platforms optimising for engagement metrics rather than authentic interactions. Their pitch for a relaunched MySpace is built around giving users more control over what they see and who they connect with, rather than letting an algorithm decide.
The announcement arrives as user frustration with major platforms peaks. Complaints about algorithmic feeds favouring strangers’ posts over friends’ updates, the mental-health toll of engagement-driven content, and the growing sense that social media has become more performative than social have opened a market gap the Vanderhooks believe MySpace can fill.
Chris and Tim Vanderhook From the world’s biggest website to irrelevance: what happened to MySpaceTo understand what MySpace is trying to come back from, you need to understand what it once was.
MySpace launched in August 2003, created by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in Los Angeles. It grew extraordinarily fast, becoming the most visited website in the United States by 2006, ahead of Google at its peak. At its height, it had more than 100 million registered accounts and was the defining social network of the mid-2000s.
Users could customise their profiles with custom HTML, set a song to play on every visit, and rank their closest friends in a list that generated more social anxiety than almost anything the internet had produced to that point.
News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s media company, bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million, a deal widely considered a coup at the time. It turned out to be one of the most expensive miscalculations in digital media history.
The decline was swift and total. Facebook, which opened to the general public in 2006, offered a cleaner interface, a more intuitive design, and a real-name culture that felt more trustworthy. MySpace had become cluttered, slow, and increasingly associated with spam. Users migrated in their millions, and the platform never recovered.
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News Corporation offloaded MySpace in 2011 for a mere $35 million, a loss of over $500 million on its original investment. A string of owners tried to reinvent the platform in the years that followed, with pop star Justin Timberlake famously joining the 2011 buying group. For a brief stretch, MySpace tried to rebrand as a music-discovery hub. It didn’t take off. The site faded into obscurity, holding onto only a small but devoted community of musicians and fans.
The Vanderhooks, who run digital advertising company Specific Media, acquired MySpace as part of that 2011 deal and have held it since. They are now betting that the conditions that killed MySpace, Facebook’s dominance and a superior product, have created a new opening two decades later, as that same dominant platform faces growing user dissatisfaction, regulatory scrutiny, and competition from short-form video.
Whether a relaunched MySpace can attract the scale needed to matter in 2026 is genuinely uncertain. The social media landscape it would be entering is far more crowded and competitive than the one it left. Yet the frustration driving this attempt is real, and if the internet has taught us anything, it’s that users will move when something better comes along.
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