Myspace comeback talk got real this week after the brothers who own the platform confirmed in a new documentary that they intend to relaunch it, then declined to say when.
Chris and Tim Vanderhook bought Myspace from News Corp in 2011 through their company Specific Media, which is now part of Viant Technology. Speaking in Tommy Avallone’s documentary about the site, Chris said they still own it, that they consider themselves stewards of the brand at this point, and that they are going to relaunch it. He said they are “just waiting for the right time to do it.” Tim’s line was that if the relaunch does not work, they will simply do it again.
The pitch itself is coherent. The Vanderhooks say they want to build something that feels different from the current crop of apps, which users increasingly complain are built around algorithms and designed to keep people scrolling with no end point. There is a real audience for that read right now, and the Myspace comeback lands at a moment when a lot of people are openly tired of feeds that decide for them what they see.
The complication is that they already ran this exact play and it did not work. Tim said in the documentary that they built an entirely new Myspace and tried to modernize the site, but the company underneath the brand had already changed. Chris said four separate sets of management and CEOs had cycled through before the brothers arrived, and that a lot of the people still there were done. By then Facebook had the users, advertisers had moved on, and the cultural pull was gone. The rebuilt version went nowhere.
Some context for anyone who came up after all this. Myspace launched on August 1, 2003, built by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe. It became the most visited website in the United States in 2006 and pushed past 100 million users, and it effectively ran the internet from roughly 2005 through 2008. In 2008 both Myspace and Facebook were pulling around 115 million visitors a month, which was the last moment they were even. Facebook’s growth after that was more than Myspace could answer.
What made it different from what came after was that a profile was something you built rather than a template you filled out. Customizable pages, music features and the Top Friends list gave people a way to say who they were and who they ran with, publicly and permanently. For independent artists in particular, a Myspace page was distribution. You put the song on your profile and people heard it because they came to you, not because a system decided to serve you to them. That is the thing the Myspace comeback is really promising to bring back, and it is a much harder promise than a redesign.
Tom is not part of it. Any relaunch moves forward without Anderson, the automatic first friend on nearly every account ever made, who has not posted on the platform since 2013.
The current site is still live and it is rough. As recently as 2024 the homepage was surfacing articles from 2022, with broken images and dead links throughout.
The Vanderhooks have always had a flair for the announcement. Their 2011 acquisition kicked off with a press release saying Justin Timberlake had joined their acquisition team, issued before they had actually spoken to him. Fifteen years later they are again generating a news cycle for a product that does not exist yet.
What they own is a trademark, an enormous amount of goodwill and a story people want to be true. What they have not shown is a build, a date or an answer to the questions any new social platform has to answer now about privacy, moderation and how it gets paid for. Those questions were not on the table in 2003. They are the whole business now.
