How Tom Anderson And Chris DeWolfe Founded Myspace – History

A Short History Of MySpace and Founders Tom Anderson And Chris DeWolfe

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. What was once the proving ground for social media has since become the punch line of many jokes. The history of MySpace.com is a tale of energetic innovation, risk, and ultimately, failure to capitalize. While some people believe that MySpace was the original social networking site, it is actually based off of an existing model that was functionally success for its time. In August of 2003, several employees of eUniverse, now called Intermix Media Inc, recognized the growing potential of a social networking site where they all had accounts (Friendster). Copying the model and losing the less popular features, the employees created a working prototype design for what they coined as MySpace. All the work was done in only ten days, in which the first version of MySpace was actually built. The project was headed by Tom Anderson who started as a CEO of the new company and Chris DeWolfe who became its president. These two guys are nowadays recognized as the founders of the company.

eUniverse provided the resources necessary to launch the site, providing everything from programmers to project leaders, as well as needed funding. The first people who used the site were the employees of the company. In order to garner initial interest, recruiting users became an office contest. eUnivere’s massive contact list of over 20 million enabled them to hit the ground running in terms of traffic.

Early on the founders disagreed about charging for the service, although eventually it was decided to keep the features free and open to the public instead of cashing in directly from their users.

MySpace's office in Beverly Hills. Photographed on April 21, 2007 by user Coolcaesar, src. wikimedia.org

The founding company was bought in July of 2005 by the owner of Fox News. Rupert Murdoch’s corporation took the concept of MySpace global, extending the site into other language markets like the UK and China. The sudden rise in popularity, with the ease and accessibility offered by the new medium, led to MySpace becoming an industry leader.

Once valued at $12 billion, MySpace was actually consistently beating out competitor Facebook for traffic. Its once progressive innovation, however, soon became stagnant. The lack of foresight into what users demanded led to its initial downfall, and the mismanagement of the property pushed membership down to record low numbers.