MySpace Officially Dead to Advertisers

The Google deal was running out, the users were leaving, and the ad buyers had already moved to Facebook. The funeral took another year.

By spring 2010, MySpace was a mall with the lights still on. The users were drifting to Facebook. The ad buyers had noticed first.

The clock that mattered was the Google search and ad deal. Announced in 2006 and valued at $900 million, it guaranteed MySpace payments tied to traffic targets through June 30, 2010, with $300 million in the final year. TechCrunch reported in 2009 that MySpace hit some of those targets partly by making search worse for its own users, and that Google was unhappy and unlikely to renew on anything like the same terms. When your biggest advertiser is counting the days, you are not a media company anymore. You are a contract.

What came next

In January 2011 MySpace cut about 500 jobs, nearly half its staff. On June 29, 2011, News Corp sold it to Specific Media for a reported $35 million, mostly in stock. News Corp had paid $580 million in 2005. Justin Timberlake joined the buyers, which tells you how the deal was being marketed.

How it aged

The postscript is better than the story. Specific Media, an Irvine ad network run by the Vanderhook brothers, renamed itself Viant. Time Inc. took majority control of Viant, and MySpace with it, in 2016. In 2019 MySpace admitted a server migration had lost years of uploads, with outside estimates around 50 million songs.

Viant today is a public DSP run by Tim Vanderhook. MySpace is a cautionary tale and a trivia question. The ad network that bought the dead social network outlived it by a decade, which is the most ad tech ending possible.

This page rebuilds a May 2010 IndustryPace post whose original text is not available. Facts come from TechCrunch, Salon/AP and Variety reporting on the Google deal, the 2011 sale and the 2019 data loss. Disclosures: ADOTAT currently covers Viant, and the author ran a competing ad network, Vizi, in the late 2000s.