Myspace's Owners Say They Will Relaunch the Platform, No Date Set

Myspace is getting another shot at relevance, or at least its owners say it is.

Chris and Tim Vanderhook, brothers who run digital advertising company Specific Media and have owned Myspace since 2011, say they're planning to relaunch the platform, according to a new documentary titled "Myspace" directed by Tommy Avallone. "We still own Myspace. We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace," Chris Vanderhook says in the film, according to Russh, which cited reporting from People. "We're just waiting for the right time to do it."

There's no launch date. There's no product demo. There's a documentary and a promise.

The pitch, according to Russh and technext24, is that Myspace 2.0 would ditch the algorithm-driven feeds that define Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and instead let users control what they see and who they connect with. Myspace co-founder Chris DeWolfe told People, as reported by Russh, that current platforms are built to maximize time spent, not user well-being. "I do think the algorithms have a lot to do with the addictive nature of social media," DeWolfe said. "Everything's programmed to you and what you're going to like, with the complete and total notion of increasing the amount of minutes that you're going to spend on a particular social media site." He said the old Myspace wasn't built around "the whole FOMO aspect of life."

Plenty of ordinary users across the political spectrum have said the same thing about infinite-scroll feeds and engagement-optimized algorithms. Meta and TikTok have faced lawsuits and legislative scrutiny over alleged mental health harms tied to their platforms, including a case cited by Fox Business in which four states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties from Meta over child social media addiction claims. Meta disputes those claims. Whether a relaunched Myspace could actually solve the problem DeWolfe describes, rather than just market itself against it, is an open question nobody in these reports answers.

The Vanderhooks already tried this. They bought Myspace from News Corp in 2011, in a deal Chris Vanderhook secured partly by faking a press release claiming Justin Timberlake had joined their acquisition team before they'd even talked to him, according to the documentary as reported by Russh. Timberlake actually did come aboard afterward as an investor, and the brothers relaunched Myspace as a music-discovery platform. It didn't work. "We really tried to modernize it, but it was a different company at that point. It wasn't the same Myspace," Tim Vanderhook says in the documentary, as reported by the New York Post and Fox Business. Chris added that by the time they took over, Myspace had already burned through four sets of management and CEOs. "We were going to be the fifth ones, and I think that there were a lot of the people who were really just done."

This time, Tim Vanderhook says they're prepared for another miss. "And if that one doesn't work, we'll do it again," he said.

The numbers explain why nobody's rushing a launch date. Myspace launched in August 2003, founded by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in Los Angeles, and by 2006 it was the most visited website in the United States, ahead of Google, according to technext24. News Corp bought it in 2005 for $580 million. Facebook caught up fast: both platforms drew roughly 115 million monthly visitors by 2008, but Facebook passed Myspace in global traffic that year and took over Myspace's core U.S. demographic by 2009, according to the New York Post and Fox Business. News Corp sold Myspace in 2011 for $35 million, a loss of more than $500 million on the original purchase, according to technext24.

Tom Anderson, the co-founder who became famous as every new user's automatic first friend, sold his stake back in 2005 and reportedly has no role in the new relaunch effort, per the New York Post and Fox Business.

Nostalgia isn't a business model, and "no algorithm" isn't a product. Building a social network people actually use, at scale, against Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X takes more than good intentions about user well-being. Myspace already had one shot at reinvention with Timberlake's money and star power behind it in 2011, and it fizzled into a niche home for musicians and diehards.

Whether this second relaunch attempt gets further than a documentary promo tour is the actual test. Right now there's no announced product, no timeline, and no confirmed investors. The Vanderhooks have owned the brand for over 14 years without a durable comeback. The next concrete marker to watch for is whether they name an actual launch date, or whether "we'll do it again" becomes the company's permanent tagline.