After the 2002 launch of Friendster, several eUniverse employees with Friendster accounts saw its potential and decided to mimic the more popular features of the social networking website, in August 2003. Within 10 days, the first version of MySpace was ready for launch. [9] A complete infrastructure of finance, human resources, technical expertise, bandwidth, and server capacity was available for the site, right out of the gate, so the MySpace team wasn������¢���¯���¿���½���¯���¿���½t distracted with typical start-up issues. The project was overseen by Brad Greenspan (eUniverse's Founder, Chairman, CEO), who managed Chris DeWolfe (MySpace's starting CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace's starting president), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse.
The very first MySpace users were eUniverse employees. The company held contests to see who could sign-up the most users.[10] The company then used its resources to push MySpace to the masses. eUniverse used its 20 million users and e-mail subscribers to quickly breathe life into MySpace,[11] and move it to the head of the pack of social networking websites. A key architect was tech expert Toan Nguyen who helped stabilize the MySpace platform when Brad Greenspan asked him to join the team.[12]
The origin of the MySpace.com domain was a site owned by YourZ.com, Inc.[13] It was intended to be a leading online data storage and sharing site up until 2002. By 2004, MySpace and MySpace.com, which existed as a brand associated with YourZ.com,[14][15] had made the transition from a virtual storage site to a social networking site. This is the natural connection to Chris DeWolfe and a friend, who reminded him he had earlier bought the URL domain, MySpace.com, intending it to be used as a web hosting site,[16] since both worked at one time in the virtual data storage business, which itself was a casualty of the "dot bomb" era.
Shortly after launching the site, team member Chris DeWolfe suggested that they start charging a fee for the basic MySpace service.[17] Brad Greenspan nixed the idea, believing that keeping MySpace free and open was necessary to make it a large and successful community.[18]
Some employees of MySpace including DeWolfe and Berman were later able to purchase equity in the property before MySpace, and its parent company eUniverse (now renamed Intermix Media) was bought in July 2005 for US$580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (the parent company of Fox Broadcasting and other media enterprises).[19][9] Of this amount, approximately US$327 million has been attributed to the value of MySpace according to the financial adviser fairness opinion.[20]
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