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MySpace’s death spiral: insiders say it’s due to bets on Los Angeles & Microsoft. In the Namesake community we have a ton of ex-MySpacers. What really killed MySpace? Culture? DNA? Technology? Facebook? Poor product execution? http://scoble.it/fmegPJ
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I could agree with the Microsoft bit, but not the LA bit. I maintain (as always) that there is strong dev talent to be found, you just have to know how to look for it.
I think on a fundamental level MySpace was a victim of its success. They built the team into a huge behemoth that was unable to be agile. -
As the designated rabble-rouser, I have to call BS on the Microsoft bit. Guys, we three were all there at Fox during this time (had you joined @Clint Ivy ?) and saw MySpace engineering do some pretty cool stuff - like scale <1B page views to >5B in less than 1 year. There were a few smart guys at MySpace (Jim Benedetto comes to mind) that understood scale. Was it perfect? Heck no. But it was functional. And the product HAD evolved - photo pages were added, comments enhanced, new home page. Then circa 2006-2007 the whole product started to go sideways and delivery of new features got "constipated" (sorry couldn't find a better word :-) If the platform was totally effd-up, would the prior innovations (albeit small) have been possible?
I believe this is revisionist history by the survivors. -
As a followup, look at Comscore numbers during 2006-2007 vs 2008-2009. MySpace delivered more new feature at a higher volume (2007) than lower volume (2009). Issue sounds like culture, DNA, product execution..............
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@Clint Ivy Right on. The rational that Los Angeles killed MySpace is full of shit. MySpace killed MySpace.
Did MySpace have technical talent? Absolutely. Did Tom do more customer development pre 2007 than anyone on the consumer Internet? Yes. Did MySpace culturally become a zombie waste land of middle managers and bureaucrats post the News Corp acquisition. Totally. Did the product turn into a bloated pig with three—yes three—persistent navigational elements? Yep.
All that being said what inevitably killed MySpace was a confluence of factors. Blaming it on LA or MSFT is intellectually lazy.
Given that I was in the belly of the beast due to the acquisition of my first company I'd like to point out a few observations. I always felt the organization was incredibly poor at managing product initiatives. On the consumer Internet product is king. It's what touches the user and creates the emotional connection.
As @Clint Ivy mentioned, there was simply too much crap going on and not enough focus on the fundamental product. News, karoke, comedy, local, UHP, monetization, search, spam, splash—it was downright dizzying to keep track of what the hell was happening in the organization. To add insult to injury the News Corp acquistion created factions which—in a classic News Corp way—played talented and rational people against each other. Once this
DNA corrupting tactic came to fruition it was the equivalent of corp trench warfare. Facebook wasn't MySpace's worst enemy—MySpace was. -
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i am not an ex my spacer (neither worked there nor had an account there) but when i checked out the site i felt that it was much more about "me" presenting myself than creating relationships and maintaining relationships. it is more like turning yourself into a newspaper not the facebook way of creating a friends community platform.
then second they tried to be to narrow and switched the narrowness too often. initially it was all about and for teens then it became a music platform neither of which made it appealing to a broad audience (broader not in numbers but in reach beyond certain user groups).
i am talking in generalities here so there where exceptions to the rule but those were some of the challenges in my view. -
@Carsten Schmidt The success and virality of the product is to blame for some of how you feel. They didn't focus on building a true graph—they favored a scale, pseudo real graph. Today it seems like that was a dumb product decision but back then it was anyone's guess if this model was superior to Facebook's true friend graph.
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In a strange cross-thread moment on NameSake, the top 2 stories are connected. @Mark Suster does an amazing case of debunking the LA-is-bad-for-tech myth.
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As an ex-MySpacer, I would say that it came down to not embracing where social was going fast enough. The technology was solid and the engineering team was incredible - lots of polymaths.
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@Kunal Anand Can you elaborate on your last comment?
"Not embracing where social was going fast enough" means what exactly? Product side? Tech side? Poor vision? -
@Brian Norgard It's about the product. I recall when Facebook showed up to the party - there was lots of "it'll never work - people want to express themselves, they don't want to use their identity." That was a poor product bet.
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Depending on the goals of a social network, having a real identity in the system is important.
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While MySpace played the self-expression game, Facebook and others focused on being a utility.
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Lots of companies that represent the former model come and go. Good utilities get entrenched quickly and are hard to remove.
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The writer is a complete moron. I'll repost my comment on that article here:
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Not to sound like a know it all but...I find your entire story to be a bunch of crap.
You're overlooking the more obvious reason for its decline: False user base.
For years now MySpace has been overrun with accounts designed with the sole purpose to spam people.
If you were to look at the entire user base and IP trace each individual account you would probably find that 50-70% of the users all share the exact same IP addresses.
Even the people that don't create multiple accounts to spam about their crap use their main one to spam people.
The entire site was built on the notion of "popularity" and completely superficial relationships.
This lead to people doing noting to preserve any sort of intimacy between one another.
From the first day I signed up (and I was one of the first...my profile was in all my friends Top 8 list on their profile up until you could customize your top friends) I would be bombarded with friend requests for the sole purpose of a user claiming they have the most friends. -
This lead to companies and people not caring about how they interacted with one another and lead to constant spam via messages and bulletin board posts and the most annoying comments with digital fliers wrecking your layout and vibe.
It spun out of control.
I think if I were to go on the site right now maybe 1-2% of my friends that are active on the site would actually have a discussion with me. No one checks their messages or expects them to be anything personal or meaningful. It is just one advertisement or plug after another.
Why are you wasting your time and others trying to over think the problem that caused the decline of myspace when there is something far more obvious and important to discuss and be aware of if you or anyone else wishes to be successful in social media today.
That sort of bullshit won't fly these days. The passionate and transparent and intimate glimpses into human nature is what will lead to success from here on out.
If for no other reason than MySpace has sickened us all and made us realize we can't survive without those things. -
@Kunal Anand I remember a time when executives were more worried about TagWorld than Facebook. Crazy.
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@Brian Norgard Tag World! Wow, totally forgot about them. We should probably spin up another conversation about tagging...
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@Brian Norgard When you have to sift through 70million fake profiles spamming you in order to find one real person that just wants to talk to you long enough to make you their "friend" the entire user experience is disrupted and no longer worth the effort or time. Especially, with many other options offering more meaningful connections without the noise.
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@Brian Norgard As it would affect any other company, spam and privacy issues definitely hurt the MySpace brand. I remember feeling like I was in a pinata for months. A lot of it had to do with the fact that MySpace was the largest network at the time - it was an easy target. If any of the smaller sites had spam/privacy issues, they wouldn't have had nasty PR and people would have forgotten about it.
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I don't know what "their graph" means. I just know their code and location had nothing to do with it. Their bullshit culture did.
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I would agree with @Brian Norgard 's assessment. But I agree that L.A. or lack of engineering talent is complete B.S.
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reading all this is really interesting. makes me wonder if and if so what facebook has learned for their own success. and even more interestingly what will bring down facebook. when will people move to another platform and get bored by facebook
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@Kunal Anand if the brand started out with the right mentality it would have been easy. Again, their entire focus was built around collecting friends and this worthless notion of popularity. How do you create substance from something completely void of it to begin with?
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@Clint Ivy I just tell it how it is. If I sound bitter it is just because I am passionate for what is to come in its wake now that we can all learn from the many mistakes the people behind that site made and I'm impatient to experience it all.
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Designing social software is incredibly hard. You have to predict how millions of people will interact with a feature. And often the things that get you amazing engagement/growth in the early days kill you later--and it can take months/years to find out.
MySpace's product DNA early-on was "try everything, build a quick version of everything, and see what sticks". This was great early-on and led to confusion later. Likewise, their theory was "It's MY space--you own your space and build your identity"--this made it hard to make changes. -
While I'm not a user of the MS stack (and certainly not their older CF stack), that's not the problem. I promise you I could build a clean, scalable version of Namesake in .Net/C# if need-be. I do there there's a big enterprise software culture around .Net, not a web culture.
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In line with what @Dan Gould is saying. They obviously had huge success early on for being the first major player in this space and also people just wanted to friend everyone. I think when Facebook came out people saw that a decided they wanted to scale back friend-ing everyone under the sun and move to a cleaner more organized interface.
I think the wide open personalization was a major drawback for MySpace. It drove more people away than it brought in. The new improvements of being able to theme your page I think was a great idea but just came along as too little too late. -
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How was MySpace different from a roadside restroom? One had tons of people leaving a terrible mess; you didn't want to touch or look at anything; you needed to go there from something but then hurry out; you don't want to return after the first experience. And the other has soda machines.
You can't run a successful social network if your user base has contempt for you. I think there were great ideas and great potential. @Brian Norgard touched on it above. But the users trashed the place. -
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@Carsten Schmidt I don't think people will actively deactivate their Facebook accounts. They are a utility that's going to be around for a while. Once they fully dig their heels into mobile, they'll be cemented.
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I think Facebook couldn't have happened without people exploring social norms on MySpace.
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@Gary Livingston Interesting you feel that way. The brand was crafted around self-expression - the need to attain a popular status is a natural biproduct of the ego.
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@Dan Gould Gould, totally agree. Myspace was the testing ground for the space...we did many things wrong but at least we did them wrong first.
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And, while I have lots of criticisms of MySpace, in their defense, once you try to build stuff for massive scale, you start to take flexible code paths and etch them into stone. Backend development slows down dramatically.
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@Kunal Anand i don't think that facebooks challenge is that people will actively deactivate their accounts but they might just stop using the accounts. i see myself spend much less time on it than i used to. maybe once a week. and once people use it less it becomes less interesting to use. ... i admit i am a user group of one, but i also have seen a ton of technologies come and go in just the last 20 years so to think that something will last a lifetime (or even more than 10 years) for that it has to be exceptionally good.
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Hey Radhika, didn't know you were around here--welcome.
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@Radhika Dani Delfosse "at least we did them wrong first" -- so true. Somebody had to do it, and Myspace was the largest social network at the time.
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@Radhika Dani Delfosse And I'd argue MySpace doesn't get enough credit for pushing the envelope in this fashion.
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When designing product, being a fast follower is often great--you don't have to think it up, you just have to improve what's been there before. (I'm sure there will be lots of Namesake clones and they won't have to iterate on conversations the way we have.)
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FWIW here's an interesting conversation about the impact of monetizing MySpace too early.
http://namesake....oo-early -
@Dan Gould Very good point Dan. MySpace just seemed so disjointed with so many things happening at once and it never really felt "natural". As someone said above, users just wanted to have the highest number of friends possible. I think Facebook became even more popular after the MySpace "overload"
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As a bemused observer at FIM during those heady acquisitive days, I have to concur with @Brian Norgard norgard. Lack of product focus was the problem, but it was indicative of execs at News Corp having 2-cent opinions on how to make MySpace better and trying to cram their features into the product.
This politicking and bureaucracy slowed down the product team. Ultimately they integrated features that detracted from the core product vision, which turned MySpace into a visionless mess. -
Damn I hate shift+enter. Bad form gents.
Anyways - MySpace is the new Yahoo. Mike Jones and his team are smart folks so I'm keen to see whether they'll be able to turn it around. -
@Kareem Mayan I got the impression that there wasn't actually too much meddling from News Corp--they did manage to keep themselves shielded
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@Kareem Mayan I still remember the day you cooked up the 'digg' clone to prove to executives it could be done (sans the community of course). Fun times.
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@Kareem Mayan agree with you about the lack of focus and remember all too well the drive for monetization behind that. Anyone remember myspace comedy? (sponsored by Sierra Mist, built in a couple of months to take advantage of a revenue opp).
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I don't know how to run a big company. I do know that there were a lot of smart people with good ideas and no easy way to try those ideas. @Brian Norgard , I remember listening to you and Justin concept a great way for group-buy to work on Myspace. And then that idea went into a drawer.
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I also remember a concept for speed dating on Myspace that I thought would have worked great.
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@Brian Norgard I didn't mean to harshly tar the whole operation, I was just making a point about how the users treated the service. They weren't invested in adding value.
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While I love that people say it's in a death spiral. I just focus on the wins: http://twitpic.com/4d075y
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To me, from the outside, it seemed like they were not able to innovate at a rate that they should have...I agree that there was a lack of focus, I saw products like "local" on Myspace and I was shocked when I joined and saw that...but...that has changed and lots of changes are happening weekly on the site and we are iterating at a pace that is unreal compared to old standards...
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MySpace would not have existed without Los Angeles. The explosive viral user growth came via band promotion and aggressive marketing. The former could only come from a company with an entertainment sensibility, the latter from the culture of LA online direct marketing firms, of which Intermix was sine qua non.
The trope of MySpace's problems came from "Fox" or "Newscorp" is as wrong (and tiresome) as the incessant Silicon Valley is superior to LA discussions. We were there. MySpace management ran MySpace and took little or no direction from Fox. Any middle managers or bureaucrats that arrived were completely created and fostered by the culture within MySpace.
NWS operated MySpace the same as every other part of the company. It provided operating cash, set top line targets, provided room to succeed or fail & gave the unit the opportunity to work other parts of the company managed by the same policies. It's difficult to see how that's not what every entrepreneur wants if their company is acquired by a large corporation. -
I was wondering about what @Jonathan Wilner just said - that LA has the advantage of the entertainment industry. Should have been a potential huge advantage for Myspace.
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@Jonathan Wilner You said, "NWS operated MySpace the same as every other part of the company. It provided operating cash, set top line targets, provided room to succeed or fail & gave the unit the opportunity to work other parts of the company managed by the same policies. It's difficult to see how that's not what every entrepreneur wants if their company is acquired by a large corporation."
Perhaps the acquisition was a key part of the problem?
You said, "Any middle managers or bureaucrats that arrived were completely created and fostered by the culture within MySpace."
True. But you can't dispute their existence. -
@Brian Norgard the way @Jonathan Wilner describes NWS' role (providing operational support and cash) sounds like a benefit, but are you implying that had Myspace been forced to survive without that parent org advantage that things might have turned out differently? Perhaps they would have been more attentive, agile, responsive, or in some other way fought harder to remain relevant?
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@Scott Magoon I tend to think acquisitions are awfully tricky. I can't speculate on the 'if' scenario.
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Blaming LA talent is easy scapegoat but they've had SF and Seattle offices for 2-3 years. Don't know enough about Microsoft relationship to comment but I do know this: Imagine what YouTube, Facebook and Twitter would look like today if they had to be profitable within the first 18-24 months of existence? What would they look like if rather than focus on user experience, growth and trial/error, they had to focus on revenues, profitability and advertiser focused product enhancements?
I think the real challenge lies right there. Additionally, while the Google deal brought in a ton of money, I've heard it had clauses that stalled innovation and advancement at a time when those were needed most. -
@Jonathan wilner "The trope of MySpace's problems came from "Fox" or "Newscorp" is as wrong (and tiresome) as the incessant Silicon Valley is superior to LA discussions. We were there. MySpace management ran MySpace and took little or no direction from Fox. Any middle managers or bureaucrats that arrived were completely created and fostered by the culture within MySpace."
MySpace management was saddled with every other FIM exec wanting a piece of their time and attention to pitch their new and awesome "monetizable" idea. Per @Brian Norgard norgard's comment - "News, karoke, comedy, local, UHP, monetization, search"... some of those were projects shoehorned into MySpace's priority list by people outside MySpace. -
(aside) @Scott Hurff you've remapped the behavior of the enter key dude. of course there are ways to get around it, but why ask users to learn this new mapping when every other site on the web (facebook aside now) and everything on their computer works differently? you're violating expectations big-time (which isn't bad, just don't see the upside - help me understand)
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Choice of Technology stack (Microsoft or Open Source for example) *rarely* has an impact on performance, scalability, and the success of your business. Rather, it's the architects and development teams that make the difference. In MySpace's case, you have a ton of people (via internal growth and acquisitions), a lot of turnover in leadership roles, and "interesting" choices on the business side on where to drive Technology. I don't think MySpace realized where they were headed early on and did not plan to grow and scale the company (and specifically their talent) in ways that would actually support their intended business goals. They effectively went on cruise control and rode the business into the ground. Technology had nothing to do with it. MySpace's culture killed Myspace.
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LA folks, is this a fair criticism of LA in comparison to the SF area? "because Los Angeles is such a large place — it can take hours to drive across the city — there isn’t a single neighborhood that has built up a good talent base, the way Palo Alto or South of Market in San Francisco has"
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Scott - that is no longer true. There are now enough concentrated areas of talent in LA that distant is no longer a factor.
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FYI - my credentials in this matter - I moved to SF in 1994 before the boom (and moved there to work for the first commercial Internet company). Spent about 10 years there watching the boom go up and down (a couple times). I worked in Soma and then the Mission - and saw how meetup groups grew up, how conferences and award ceremonies came to be, and watched how different neighborhoods and regions in the Bay Area developed over time. I have spent the last 10 years in LA (and also 1997-1998). I was part of the original VIC community and saw the various rises and falls of Tech companies and meetups and conferences until about 3 years ago when LA finally gelled. All the smack talk about LA is relevant to the "pre-millennium Internet". I just doesn't hold water anymore.
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@John Shiple maybe it's now a case of perception is reality. I have no first-hand knowledge of either locale. Except to say that we're using something right now created by a talented team in LA.
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When I look back at my 17 years in California, I worked 9 years in the Bay and 8 years in LA. However, when looking at the companies that I worked for, 4 years of opportunities came from the Bay and 13 years came from LA! Very interesting. The math is explained by the fact that I teed up work in LA, then moved to the Bay to build the company. Fortunately, I no longer need to do that anymore ;)
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I can't speak to how things were here before I joined (1/2010) although I've certainly heard some interesting stories. I also can't speak to any issues about News Corp who is a wonderful parent company who we all love dearly :)
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Whoops hit enter too soon there.
As far as Scoble's comments he is painting too broadly to say there is no great talent in LA. There certainly is. It would probably be more accurate to say it's difficult for Myspace to recruit top talent when that talent make the same money elsewhere, get equity, and along with that the excitement of a startup environment.
Many things were broken here and some still all. The culture and DNA are the hardest problems to solve and not something we can counter in the short term. The technology and architecture were too rigid to combat the crazy scale and spam issues Myspace had during its hey day. That hindered us a year ago but not recently. Now product teams are moving faster and quick iteration is happening. More so than ever I would assume.
They even got rid of all that ColdFusion legacy code :) -
@Sean Percival you paint an impressive picture.
One thing I've heard frequently is that the spambots have taken over. For example, I signed into my account after not doing so for a while and instantly got 10-15 spam messages that were obviously automated. How can that problem be solved and communicated to the user base? -
@Scott Hurff When was this? Before 12/2010? I would say the new product has helped to kill a lot of that. In the past it was very easy for bots. They had so many static URLs that bots could easy append variables to like userIDs and send msg actions.
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@Gary Livingston Trust me. 50% of accounts are not using the same IP. I think we and Comscore would notice :)
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@Brian Norgard Great point on the strength of the graph. Thinking back to those days (I was Myspace user #3201) we just had no idea what to do with this new framework for social interactions. The masses stumbled blindly through the experience and it was messy.
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@Scott Hurff Gotcha. I ask because sometime in Dec or Jan they added http://cloudmark.com which has dramatically reduced spammy users. Perhaps your experience was before this was live on site.
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@Sean Percival it'd be fascinating to hear more about the spam fighting Myspace has done. It's a hugely difficult problem as I'm sure you know. It'd also be cool to hear more about what you're doing at Myspace in terms of marketing, etc.
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I could think of plenty of reasons for why I think Myspace is where it's at now. But to echo what a few others have said, location and programming language were not it.
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Based on the short time I spent working there, I can say the following. It always felt like we wanted to go fast but were not committed to it. Hardware procurement would take weeks. It was hard to get signoff on product requirements from the 6 or so people who all felt like they were the designated stakeholders/decision makers. It was hard to get data quickly in order to iterate on new features. 3-4 week turnaround on analytics = working blindly. A lot of this was starting to change by the time I left but I can only imagine how much more effective it would have been had this not been the case to begin with.
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@Kunal Anand It was instigated by their culture and the fact everyone saw Tom with a billion friends and it was something for others to chase after. Everyone they featured and focused on where those with high friend counts too.
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Companies don't fail due to location or technology stack. They may because they fail to execute MySpace lost its way, it never really knew why it was a success, they could scale yes but they struggle to adapt their platform to add new features was tremendously difficult for them. Tech debt was huge lack of direction and vision was even bigger.
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I used MySpace during 06 and I hope this doesnt offend ex-MySpacers here ... but I hated it. For me, the UX was terrible. Although I am sure it wasn't the only reason MySpace tanked (or even if it ranks high among the reasons), but it was ugly, clunky, and burdened by users overly customizing the page. The worst was allowing background music, images and videos. If any of you ever had a few MySpace tabs open and tried to figure out which one was blaring the music, I'm sure you'll understand the frustration from the user. Also, it was trying to be too much for too many people - was it a music site? about connections? self promotion? It felt confused.
then, when i switched to facebook, it was a breath of fresh air - clean UX and a focus on what it was there for - ie, connections/sharing. I never looked back. -
@Brian Norgard it seems that there are many Myspace alumni on Namesake. I think it would be interesting if you got a large group of them together and did a public panel discussion (via an invite-only convo). Have a moderator guide the discussion through the chronology and build a full, true picture of what happened there.
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@Pat Richards I'm not sure I'm prepared to lay their failure at the feet of their tech stack. Clearly there were issues, but they managed to succeed initially on that basis as well. Somehow I think the problem is bigger than that.
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A few years ago I interviewed a developer from MySpace, one of the first 20 developers. He was bright, seemed effective, but his technical knowledge was shallow; he did not understand how the site operated at a fundamental level (i.e., getting bytes from a server to a browser). He did say that MS's consultants were a great help in scaling the site. The stack worked, but a lack of fundamentalist zeal is not a good thing.
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Interesting point on technology; I'd never really thought that was a major factor in their demise. In fact, some colleagues of mine split tested the load times of Facebook vs. Myspace shortly before Facebook eclipsed Myspace; Myspace won handily. However, I am friends with a guy that's worked there for a long time, and apparently, the entire site is built on WordPress I think when a company gains that type of dominance, there's usually a target on their back. If that's the case, you have to keep innovating. Myspace didn't do that. I think their utter lack of product extension (innovation) and the fickle nature of consumers were the two largest factors.
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- Roman Reyhani
- Jake Burkett
- Xavier Stevens
- Scott Hurff
- Christopher Smith
- Scott Magoon
- Tim Brady
- Jason Kirk
- Tsega Dinka
- Gary Livingston
- Christopher Adedeji
- Brian Norgard
- Clint Ivy
- Kareem Mayan
- John Shiple
- Radhika Dani Delfosse
- Dan Gould
- Kunal Anand
- Jon Stewart
- Tony Adam
- Jonathan Wilner
- Carsten Schmidt
- Ravi Narasimhan
- Pat Richards
- Sean Percival
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