MySpace, the social network of your awkward adolescence, has a new owner
Time Inc announced Thursday that it has acquired Viant, an advertising technology company you've probably never heard of, but which happens to own MySpace through a previous acquisition.
Put another way: a publishing giant actively looking to boost its millennial audience online now owns a website famous for losing that audience.
The deal, however, has less to do with MySpace itself than its parent company's marketing data. In this acquisition, as in history, MySpace is just a footnote.
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MySpace launched in 2003 and quickly overtook Friendster (yes, we know this sentence has a lot of old references in it) to become the dominant social network.
It gave birth to celebrities like Tila Tequila and musicians like the Arctic Monkeys (ugh, more old references) and proved that social media could be big business.
Then Facebook came along with a cleaner interface and blew past its competitors to become a $300 billion colossus.
MySpace, on the other hand, has since been bought and sold three times.
At its peak in 2006, MySpace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for what was then an astounding $580 million. Six years later, with the MySpace era long over, the social network was sold to Specific Media, an ad network, for $35 million.
Specific Media, a subsidiary of Viant, tried to re-launch MySpace in 2013 with a glitzy redesign focused on music discovery, a $20 million ad blitz targeting young people and the some financial backing from none other than Justin Timberlake.
As of this time last year, MySpace was drawing in 50 million users a month, thanks in no small part to nostalgia: Many users returned to the site to dig old pictures for Throwback Thursdays, a popular social media tradition.
No terms were disclosed for the Viant acquisition, suggesting a low price tag. But who knows, perhaps the third acquisition will be a charm for MySpace.
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Seth Fiegerman was a Senior Business Reporter at Mashable, where he covered startups, marketing and the latest consumer tech trends. He joined Mashable in August 2012 and is based in New York.Before joining Mashable, Seth covered all things Apple as a reporter at Silicon Alley Insider, the tech section of Business Insider. He has also worked as a staff writer at TheStreet.com and as an editor at Playboy Magazine. His work has appeared in Newsweek, NPR, Kiplinger, Portfolio and The Huffington Post.Seth received his Bachelor of Arts from New York University, where he majored in journalism and philosophy.In his spare time, Seth enjoys bike riding around Brooklyn and writing really bad folk songs.
