In the weekending July 8th, 2006, a website built in a rented office in Santa Monica, California, became the most visited destination on the American internet. Not Amazon, not Yahoo, not Google, MySpace. According to Hitwise, the traffic analysis firm, it captured 4.5% of all internet visits in the United States that week, more than any other site in the country. And somewhere inside those numbers on a hundred million screens, the same photograph kept appearing.
A young man in a white t-shirt grinning over his shoulder at the camera, a whiteboard barely visible behind him. His name was Tom Anderson. He was everyone’s first friend. The face automatically added to every new MySpace account. And by the end of that year, the platform behind that photograph would be valued at $6 billion, climbing toward 12 billion.
Tom Anderson’s Grin was the front door of the biggest social network on Earth. 5 years later, in June of 2011, News Corporation sold MySpace to an advertising firm called Specific Media and the pop singer Justin Timberlake for approximately $35 million. News Corp had paid 580 million for it. The sale price was roughly what the platform had cost to operate for a single month at its peak, a 94% loss on the purchase price alone. The most visited website in America had become a rounding error on a media conglomerate’s balance sheet.
And the photograph of Tom Anderson in the white t-shirt had already been quietly replaced by a corporate logo. This is
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