Myspace History

Left,Myspace Original Logo.
Before the creation of the current social networking website, the myspace.com domain name was already registered in 1998 to a San Francisco-based online storage and file sharing firm. Registration was free and users were able to obtain a small disk quota which would gradually increase if they referred new members to the site. Due to slow service and a lack of revenue, the original website shut down and sold all of its users' information in 2001.

The current MySpace service was founded in July 2003 by Tom Anderson (an alumnus of both the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles), the current president and CEO, Chris DeWolfe (a graduate of University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business), and a small team of programmers. It was partially owned by Intermix Media, which was bought in July 2005 for US$580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (the parent company of Fox Broadcasting and other media enterprises).Of this amount, approx. US$327mm has been attributed to the value of MySpace according to the financial advisor fairness opinion.

The corporate history of MySpace as well as the status of Tom Anderson as a MySpace founder has been a matter of some public dispute.

In January 2006, Fox announced plans to launch a UK version of MySpace in a bid to "tap into the UK music scene" which they have since done (see MySpace International). They also plan to launch in China and possibly other countries.