EricEwe.com

In the book, Stealing MySpace by Julia Angwin (published in 2009), it brought up lots of interesting facts especially in the earlier years. Here are some things that you might not know about that small company that started in Los Angeles, CA.

• Domain name (MySpace.com). The original domain name was bought and utilized as a free online file storage and at its peak, it saw 7.5 million registered users utilizing their service. They competed with XDrive which offered 100MB of free space, while MySpace offered 300MB. They folded and that domain was bought by DeWolfe of ResponseBase for $5000.
• Spam and trash. ResponseBase who developed MySpace did everything from spam, small trashy remote control cars which had a high return rate, useless eBooks which had lots of complaints. ResponseBase was also involved with spyware and unauthorized pop-up installation. ResponseBase was part of eUniverse which was later rebranded as Intermix.
• Rip Off concept. MySpace were no innovators. They copied Friendster, one after another application. They even copied some applications out there which resulted in them being sued and they settled out of court, to renaming some of their applications. i.e. hot-or-not. MySpace was developed to go after Friendster’s market, as they saw Google offering Friendster $30 million in Summer 2003.
• Ownership. MySpace was a side project for ResponseBase and ResponseBase was owned by Intermix. Intermix was bought my News Corp, not MySpace. News Corp was interested in acquiring MySpace but bought Intermix to get to it.
• Price. Intermix was bought for $580 million by News Corp. Unknown to the general public, some of the people who came up with MySpace pocketed $75 million over two years following the sale. DeWolfe and Anderson got $30 million for two year per person, which other shared $15 million over two year.
• Contender. Other than News Corp, Viacom was actively looking to buy Intermix due to the success of MySpace.