Can MySpace Really Mount a Comeback?

For a generation that remembers customizing profile pages, choosing a favorite song and receiving a friend request from Tom, the return of MySpace may sound like a trip back to the early 2000s.

But nostalgia is not the same thing as a viable social network.

The owners of MySpace, brothers Tim and Chris Vanderhook, say they intend to relaunch the platform. The question is whether the site that once defined social networking can find a place in an industry now dominated by algorithmic feeds, short videos and platforms with billions of users.

“We still own Myspace. We are stewards of the MySpace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace. We’re just waiting for the right time to do it,” they said in the documentary “MySpace,” directed by Tommy Avalone. “And if that one doesn’t work, we’ll do it again.”

That confidence comes with some history.

MySpace was founded in 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe and became the world’s most popular social networking site, reaching 115 million monthly visitors in 2008. Facebook eventually overtook it, and MySpace became a symbol of an earlier internet era.

The Vanderhook brothers acquired the company in 2011 and later tried to rebuild it as an entertainment-focused social platform. The effort struggled to attract users and advertisers.

“It just became an onslaught of losses,” Tim Vanderhook said in the documentary.

“We lost a little over $150 million,” Chris Vanderhook added.

The brothers have not provided a timetable for the new relaunch.

The internet has changed

A revived Myspace would enter a social media market that bears little resemblance to the one it dominated nearly two decades ago.

Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Reddit have trained users to expect personalized feeds, seamless content discovery and constant streams of short-form material. At the same time, governments and courts are increasingly scrutinizing the effects of social media on young people.

There is also growing evidence of fatigue with traditional social media. Some users are turning toward smaller communities, private groups and less algorithmically driven online experiences. Others are spending less time online altogether.

“Excitement about Myspace’s relaunch reflects nostalgia for a more analog time, when algorithms were less dominant in our lives,” said Kate Winick, a principal analyst at Forrester.

“We’re seeing this in recent moves by both brands and users towards smaller, more private social experiences that feel less built for the algorithm and more personal to the individual user, like the explosion of growth on Substack and private communities on Discord.” Winick said.

That could create an opening for MySpace. But it could also expose one of its biggest problems.

The people most likely to feel nostalgic about MySpace are now older adults with jobs, families and established digital habits. Younger users have no personal connection to the original site.

“If Myspace follows the traditional playbook, they’re simply the smallest game in town; if they lean too hard into old MySpace, they’ll struggle to meet the expectations of a generation who are used to a much cleaner and simpler user experience,” Winick said.

The highly customizable pages that made Myspace distinctive could actually be a liability today. Building a profile in the 2000s often required more effort than creating an account on today’s major platforms.

“It’s unlikely that anyone who actually wants to spend less time online is going to decide to spend more time online to achieve an ‘offline’ aesthetic. They’d have to carefully thread that needle,” Winick said.

Nostalgia can get people to sign up. It may not keep them there.

MySpace has something that most new social platforms would pay heavily to obtain: immediate brand recognition.

The challenge is converting that recognition into sustained engagement.

“One of the reasons MySpace lost out to Facebook years ago was the failure to appeal to older users, and one of the things that cemented TikTok’s success on the business side was the fast growth it saw in millennial and older demographics,” Winick said.

A successful relaunch would therefore need to appeal not only to millennials who remember the original platform but also to younger users who never experienced it.

That means MySpace would have to offer something more than a recreation of its old design. It would need to persuade people to create content, return regularly and build communities on a platform where their friends may not already be.

Recent social media launches offer a warning.

Noplace, a text-based platform aimed at Gen Z and designed with a MySpace-inspired aesthetic, briefly reached the top of Apple’s App Store before quickly falling from the most-downloaded rankings.

Bluesky also experienced a rapid rise as users looked for an alternative to X, formerly Twitter. But its popularity later declined from its peak.

BeReal provides another example. The photo-sharing service became particularly popular during the pandemic, but its monthly active users subsequently fell from about 20 million at its peak in 2022 to roughly 16 million, according to SimilarWeb data shared with TechCrunch.

The lesson is straightforward: getting attention is easier than sustaining it.

The harder question: Can MySpace make money?

Even if MySpace attracts users, it will need advertisers.

That may be difficult for a smaller platform competing against companies with enormous audiences and sophisticated advertising systems.

“The question for MySpace isn’t will it eat Facebook’s lunch twenty years later, but can it relaunch as a small ads platform and still be profitable,” said Jamie MacEwan, a senior research analyst at Enders.

A smaller platform does not need to become the next Facebook to succeed. But it needs enough users and engagement to give advertisers a reason to spend money there.

MacEwan said MySpace would need to balance investment in growth with the economics of operating a smaller platform. Advertisers tend to favor networks where they already have established audiences and measurable results.

Winick said companies often wait to see whether their customers are actually active on a new platform before shifting advertising budgets there.

That creates a difficult cycle for MySpace. Users may not come unless there is interesting content. Creators may not produce content unless there are users. Advertisers may not spend unless both are already there.

An antidote to social media?

There may nevertheless be a strategy that gives MySpace a chance.

Rather than trying to compete directly with Meta, TikTok or YouTube, the revived platform could position itself as an alternative to them.

“I wouldn’t necessarily see the smaller launches as a direct challenge to incumbent networks,” MacEwan said. “It’s more about counter-programming, identifying where the big platforms have gone too far and trying to sell something as an antidote to user fatigue.”

That may be Myspace’s strongest argument.

The original platform succeeded partly because it felt different. Its customizable profiles and chaotic pages gave users an unusual degree of control over how they presented themselves online.

A modern version could try to revive that sense of ownership while avoiding the cumbersome design and technical complexity of the original.

But it would have to do so without simply becoming another algorithm-driven social network.

The opportunity lies in establishing a distinct and sustainable role within today’s social media landscape, rather than attempting to reclaim its former dominance.

The brothers who own it have already tried once. “And if that one doesn’t work, we’ll do it again.”

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