A Brief History of MySpace

Myspace was originally started by eUniverse in 1998. At the launch, the project leads were Chris DeWolfe, Tom Anderson, and Josh Berman. When it launched, Social Networking had not yet come into it's own on the internet; making marketing it quite difficult. Initially, the eUniverse team members themselves evangelized their product, have contests to see which of them could sign up the most users. As it progressed, it seemed less and less likely that MySpace would be able to turn a profit. Indeed, prior to 2003, it didn't even make a blip on the traffic radar of the internet. November of 2003 was where it's very existence became evident. Slightly prior to that, it was actually losing ground as far as traffic went. Traffic then grew at a steady rate until around November of 2005, where traffic started a steep climb to the top. As is the nature of social applications and websites, it was experiencing the viral growth that generally leads to success. Sure enough, traffic continued climbing at an ever increasing rate until eventually, MySpace was solidly planted within the top 10 most visited sites on the internet.

A Brief History of Myspace Marketing

With it's ever growing traffic and tremendous popularity within the elusive "25 and under" crowd, it was only a matter of time before MySpace gained the eye of internet marketers. It was already a darling of local bands, and some less than ethical marketers saw an opening, and went for it. For awhile, Spam bulletins hawking everything from ringtones to sex toys plagued MySpace, rendering bulletins practically useless. Eventually, MySpace tightened up security, and put an end to this practice. That is not to say myspace marketing is dead however. A new set of tools, aimed at the promotion of bands and small business came into existance. This myspace friend adder software allowed companies to reach out to the internet community, without coming under the scrutiny of MySpace's Terms of Service. The tools have many things in common with the earlier spam tools, like the ability to add bulk myspace friends, add comments/bulletins, and send out messages in bulk. The difference however, is that they were set to operate at a much lower speed advantageous to small business and local bands, and making the tools not as functional for the bulk spammers that plagued myspace early on. Use of such tools has become common, and MySpace has yet to take action against non-abusive advertisers.