Myspace eyes comeback to rival giants amid growing social media fatigue

Millennials may feel a pang of nostalgia at the news of Myspace’s planned revival, but analysts caution that the once-dominant social media platform faces long odds in an overcrowded market dominated by algorithm-driven feeds and short attention spans.

Its owners, Tim and Chris Vanderhook, co-founders of Viant Technology, recently appeared in a documentary, “Myspace,” directed by Tommy Avalone, where they teased another “relaunch” after a previous failed attempt in 2013.

“We still own Myspace. We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace. We’re just waiting for the right time to do it,” They said in the documentary. “And if that one doesn’t work, we’ll do it again.”

Myspace, co-founded in 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, was acquired by the Vanderhook brothers in 2011. The platform is remembered for its quirky interface, customizable profiles, glittering layout, and everyone’s first friend “Tom.”

Once the most popular social media website in the world, with 115 million visitors per month in 2008, it was quickly overtaken by Facebook and became a relic of the Y2K era.

The Vanderhook brothers attempted to “modernize” the platform by building an “entirely new Myspace.” Still, with a revolving door of owners and the loss of advertisers to Facebook, the platform struggled. “It just became an onslaught of losses,” Tim Vanderhook said in the documentary. “We lost a little over $150 million,” Chris Vanderhook added. They didn’t outline a clear timeline for rollout.

If Myspace were to relaunch, it would be entering a complicated new era of social media, one in which the dominant players such as Meta‘s Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and Reddit, among others, are grappling with a wave of legal backlash as well as growing digital fatigue.

“Excitement about Myspace’s relaunch reflects nostalgia for a more analog time, when algorithms were less dominant in our lives,” Kate Winick, a principal analyst at Forrester, told CNBC.

“We’re seeing this in recent moves by both brands and users towards smaller, more private social experiences that feel less built for the algorithm and more personal to the individual user, like the explosion of growth on Substack and private communities on Discord.” Winick said.

It also comes as millennials and Gen Zers are increasingly opting out of social media use, due to declining mental health and addiction driven by dominant platforms. Instead, they’re looking to go offline, embrace analog technology, and yearn for the 90s and early 2000s.

With these headwinds in sight, the success of Myspace hinges on some key factors, including attracting advertisers, sustaining user interest, and dodging a thorny regulatory environment.

Myspace has to balance users’ appetite for nostalgia with the clean interfaces, seamless discovery, and short-form content that have come to define modern social media.

“If Myspace follows the traditional playbook, they’re simply the smallest game in town; if they lean too hard into old Myspace, they’ll struggle to meet the expectations of a generation who are used to a much cleaner and simpler user experience,” Winick said.

She explained that the interface of the 2000s is comparably “labour-intensive,” especially for younger users who have grown up on TikTok and Instagram. “It’s unlikely that anyone who actually wants to spend less time online is going to decide to spend more time online to achieve an ‘offline’ aesthetic. They’d have to carefully thread that needle.”

However, with massive brand recognition, Myspace is ahead of many of the smaller players and has a decent chance of success.

First is nailing the demographic, as the generation who remember the platform fondly are “busy midlife adults with careers and families,” who are unlikely to take up posting on another channel. Instead, they’ll have to build a “meaningfully different product,” and focus heavily on attracting Gen Z and Gen Alpha, Winick said.

“One of the reasons Myspace lost out to Facebook years ago was the failure to appeal to older users, and one of the things that cemented TikTok’s success on the business side was the fast growth it saw in millennial and older demographics,” she said.

With regulations to ban teens from social media underway, Myspace will have to pursue a strategy that is inclusive of older users, who are also the primary spenders.

“One of the reasons MySpace lost out to Facebook years ago was the failure to appeal to older users, and one of the things that cemented TikTok’s success on the business side was the fast growth it saw in millennial and older demographics.”

Enders Senior Research Analyst Jamie MacEwan said Myspace will have to work harder to attract advertisers than big platforms, which have proven metrics.

“The question for Myspace isn’t will it eat Facebook’s lunch twenty years later, but can it relaunch as a small ads platform and still be profitable,” MacEwan said.

He added that it will have to balance investing in growth with remaining lean as revenues are lower at mid-sized platforms, which are easier for advertisers to ignore. “SMEs are more likely to spend on platforms they already have a presence on.”

While it doesn’t need to be the biggest platform to make money, it has to incentivize users to create content that people actually spend time looking at, because that’s how you make advertising money.

Additionally, Winick added that most businesses will wait to see if their customers are actually active on a social media platform before they start allocating budget towards advertisements there.

“New platform adoption frequently falls off after the initial surge in interest—think of Noplace, a Gen Z-focused text-based platform with Myspace-style design, which hit number one in the app store the day of its launch, only to disappear from the ‘most downloaded’ list by the end of the following day.”

Bluesky, an open-source social platform launched as a Twitter rival in 2024, exploded in popularity as users sought an alternative to the Elon Musk-owned platform.

It raised $100 million in Series B funding in April 2025, but reportedly saw a 40% drop in daily mobile active users by the end of October over the prior 12 months.

Meanwhile, a former engineering lead at Bluesky said it had declined from a peak of 1.4 million active daily posters in late 2024 to around 600,000 in June.

Another example was the briefly popular photosharing app BeReal, which gained steam off the back of the pandemic, but its monthly active users declined from 20 million at its height in 2022 to around 16 million, according to data from SimilarWeb shared with TechCrunch.

MacEwan noted that Myspace’s success came from differentiating itself from the big platforms, including leaning into growing fatigue around algorithm-oriented feeds and addictive design features.

“I wouldn’t necessarily see the smaller launches as a direct challenge to incumbent networks,” MacEwan said. “It’s more about counter-programming, identifying where the big platforms have gone too far and trying to sell something as an antidote to user fatigue.”

While that’s rarely going to make “the next big thing,” Myspace shouldn’t necessarily be competing with the big platforms, but instead prioritize sustaining user growth and engagement.