MySpace, the abandoned social network for teens and spammers, has been passed off yet again and sold to a nearly century-old magazine publisher.
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.
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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