MySpace was never switched off. It was outgrown, sold at a loss, and then it lost most of its own archive. The site is still online in 2026, and its owners have publicly said they want to relaunch it. What ended was not the website but its position: News Corporation bought its parent company for about $580 million in 2005, Facebook passed it in US visitors in May 2009 according to comScore, and News Corp sold it six years later for a price widely reported as $35 million.
That is the short answer. The long answer is more interesting, because several of the numbers everyone repeats about MySpace do not agree with each other, and one of the most famous ones was never published by MySpace at all.
What MySpace Was Before Anyone Bought It
MySpace launched in 2003 out of eUniverse, the Los Angeles company that later renamed itself Intermix Media. It was a profile, a friends list, a song on autoplay, and a block of HTML you could edit yourself. That last part is the reason people still remember it: your page looked the way you built it, badly, and that was the point.
By 2005 it was the largest social network in the United States and the most obvious acquisition target on the web.
The $580 Million That Was Not for MySpace
On July 18, 2005, News Corporation announced a definitive agreement to acquire Intermix Media for approximately $580 million in cash, at $12 per common share. The announcement was filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, so the figure is not in dispute.
What is routinely misstated is what the money bought. News Corp's own announcement described "Intermix's brands, such as MySpace.com" as among the web's hottest properties. The $580 million was the price of Intermix Media, a company that ran MySpace along with other web properties. Almost every retelling shortens this to "News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million," which is close enough for a headline and wrong as a fact. It is also the reason estimates of what MySpace alone was worth in 2005 vary so widely: nobody bought MySpace alone.
Richard Rosenblatt, Intermix's chief executive, and Chris DeWolfe, MySpace's chief executive, were both named in the announcement as continuing in their roles under Fox Interactive Media.
The Year It Beat Google, With an Asterisk
In July 2006, the measurement firm Hitwise reported that MySpace was the most visited website by US internet users for the week ending July 8, taking about 4.5 percent of all US internet visits and finishing ahead of Yahoo Mail, Yahoo, Google and MSN.
Yahoo publicly disputed the ranking, pointing out that Hitwise counted Yahoo Mail as a separate property, and that Yahoo remained ahead if all of its domains were combined. Both statements can be true at once, which is exactly why "MySpace was bigger than Google" is a claim worth handling carefully. It described one measurement firm's weekly share of visits, not a durable verdict.
A month later, on August 7, 2006, Fox Interactive Media and Google announced a multi-year search and advertising agreement covering MySpace and most of Fox Interactive Media's properties. Under its terms Google was obligated to make guaranteed minimum revenue share payments of $900 million to Fox Interactive Media, subject to traffic and other commitments. That press release was also filed with the SEC.
When Facebook Actually Passed It
This is where the popular timeline compresses two different events into one.
According to comScore data reported at the time, Facebook overtook MySpace in worldwide unique visitors in mid-2008, with 123.9 million against MySpace's 114.6 million in May of that year. In the United States, MySpace stayed ahead for another year. comScore's May 2009 figures put Facebook at 70.278 million US unique visitors against MySpace's 70.255 million, a gap of roughly twenty thousand people out of seventy million.
comScore's own published comparison records MySpace's peak in the United States as 75.9 million monthly unique visitors in December 2008.
A note on the number you have probably seen instead. Retrospectives frequently give MySpace a peak of "115 million users," and that figure is not attributed to a named measurement firm in the pages that repeat it. Registered accounts and monthly unique visitors are different quantities, and a platform where anyone could hold several profiles will always report the larger one. The comScore visitor figures are the ones with a named source behind them, so those are the ones used here.
The 2011 Sale, and What the Filings Say
On June 29, 2011, News Corp announced it had sold MySpace to Specific Media, an advertising technology company, in a deal that also involved the musician Justin Timberlake. The $35 million price was reported by Bloomberg, NPR and ABC News, not disclosed as a flat cash figure by News Corp, and reporting at the time noted the consideration was not all cash and that News Corp took a minority equity stake in Specific Media. Earlier coverage during the sale process had put the likely range lower still.
The figure News Corp did state formally appears in its FY2011 annual report: a loss on the sale of MySpace of $254 million, net of tax. That is a filed number, and it is a different quantity from the difference between $580 million and $35 million, which is what most summaries subtract. The gap between those two ways of describing the same transaction is a good illustration of why this cluster cites filings where they exist. The same care applies to the hardware stories on this site, including what happened to BlackBerry phones, where the numbers in circulation often come from parties with something to sell.
Who Owns It Now
Specific Media was rebuilt into the advertising company Viant. On February 11, 2016, Time Inc. announced it had agreed to acquire the assets of Viant Technology. Time Inc. did not state a price in that announcement; Ad Age subsequently reported roughly $87 million, derived from a later SEC filing. Time Inc. was itself acquired by Meredith Corporation, completed on January 31, 2018.
Viant later returned to independent ownership under its co-founders, Tim and Chris Vanderhook, the brothers who had bought MySpace through Specific Media in 2011. In August 2026, CNBC and Fox Business both reported that the Vanderhooks, speaking in a documentary about the platform, said they intend to relaunch MySpace as an alternative to algorithmic feeds. Fox Business quoted Tim Vanderhook on the 2013 attempt to modernize the site, "We really tried to modernize it, but it was a different company at that point," and on trying again, "And if that one doesn't work, we'll do it again."
No launch date has been announced. A stated intention in a documentary is not a product, and this site will not treat it as one.
The 2019 Data Loss, and the Three Different Numbers
The part of the MySpace story that matters most is the part that happened long after anyone was still using it.
MySpace posted a notice reading: "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace." The notice went up quietly and only circulated widely in March 2019, when CNN, The Register, Deadline and others covered it. MySpace's own statement contains no number. It does not say how many files were lost.
The numbers came from elsewhere, and they do not match:
| Source | Figure given |
|---|---|
| MySpace's own notice | No figure. "Photos, videos and audio files" uploaded more than three years earlier |
| Contemporary press coverage, March 2019 | Around 50 million songs, from more than 14 million artists |
| The Internet Archive's collection page | The loss is described as an estimated 53 million tracks |
Then volunteers put a fraction of it back. In April 2019 the Internet Archive published "The MySpace Dragon Hoard (2008-2010)," a set of MP3 files collected from MySpace by an anonymous academic study that had crawled the site between 2008 and 2010, and which offered its copies once the loss became known. The Internet Archive's own page describes 490,000 files, around 1.3 terabytes. TechCrunch's headline the same week said 450,000 songs. Take the archive's own count over the headline, but note that the two exist, because a reader who checks will find both.
Against a loss counted in the tens of millions, half a million recovered files is a rounding error saved by people with no obligation to save it. That is the same pattern described in the platforms that shaped the internet and then vanished: the archive survived where a volunteer happened to have a copy, and nowhere else.
Why the Story Is Not "Facebook Won"
MySpace lost its lead to a better-run competitor. That much is ordinary. What makes it worth writing about is everything after: a parent company that had paid nine figures for the surrounding business, a search deal with a guaranteed minimum of $900 million, four sets of ownership, and then the quiet deletion of more than a decade of music that its users had uploaded and, in many cases, never kept a copy of.
The site is still there. Most of what people actually made on it is not. Readers who grew up with that music on autoplay may also recognize the shape of what happened to MP3 players and why the iPod was discontinued: the format survived, the thing you kept it on did not.
FAQ
Is MySpace still online in 2026?
Yes. The site is still reachable and still owned by Viant Technology, the advertising business the Vanderhook brothers built from Specific Media. In August 2026, CNBC and Fox Business reported the owners saying they intend to relaunch it, with no date given.
How much did News Corp pay for MySpace?
News Corporation announced on July 18, 2005 that it would acquire Intermix Media, MySpace's parent, for approximately $580 million in cash at $12 per share. The figure is for Intermix Media, not for MySpace as a standalone asset.
How much did MySpace sell for in 2011?
News Corp announced the sale to Specific Media on June 29, 2011. Bloomberg, NPR and ABC News reported a price of about $35 million, not all of it cash, with News Corp taking a minority stake in the buyer. News Corp's FY2011 annual report recorded a loss on the sale of $254 million net of tax.
Did MySpace really delete 50 million songs?
MySpace's own notice attributed the loss to a server migration and gave no number. The figure of around 50 million songs from more than 14 million artists comes from press coverage in March 2019; the Internet Archive's collection page describes an estimated 53 million tracks. There is no published figure from MySpace itself.
Can I get my old MySpace music back?
Only if it happens to sit inside a volunteer archive. The Internet Archive's MySpace Dragon Hoard holds files collected between 2008 and 2010, which is a small share of what was lost, and it was assembled from an outside crawl rather than from MySpace.
