Justin Timberlake is trying to revive MySpace. No, really!
The Social Network co-star will attempt to compete against the character he helped to realize a billion dollars is cooler than a million dollars by re-launching MySpace, the once-popular social network site that has since been reduced to rubble by Facebook.
MySpace 2.0 actually looks pretty good too. Check it out:
So how does Timberlake play in to all this? When Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005, it made big news. After all, that was when social networks were still in their relative infancy. One of them being valued at more than half a billion was a big deal.
When Justin Timberlake teamed up with Chris and Tim Vanderhook to buy MySpace off of media mogul Murdoch for $35 million a year ago, few people paid attention. By that time, Facebook had taken over the social media scene such that the idea of a MySpace revival was more a topic of humor than a serious industry discussion.
Related: MySpace adds 1 million new users.
But now, the MySpace corpse appears to not be done twitching after all. The revamped site is taking a page from Pinterest by featuring a sleek design able to display a lot of content without seeming too “busy”.
To get back to the top of the hill though, one might question the approach of MySpace’s new owners. Said Tim Vanderhook in a comment to Hollywood Reporter, “In a single sentence, it’s a social network for the creative community to connect to their fans. We’re going after artists.”
MySpace will need a lot more than just a few artists promoting themselves through their site. Facebook currently has 950 million active monthly users. That’s more than five times the total number of accounts that have been created on MySpace, to say nothing of the number of those accounts that are actually active.