MySpace

Founded in 2003, a year before Facebook, MySpace boasted about 250 million users in the United States in its heyday. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation paid $580 million to buy the site’s parent company. Around that time, Myspace.com also became the most-visited website in the United States, briefly overtaking Google. The troubles at MySpace began almost as soon as News Corporation scooped up Intermix Media, whose main asset was Myspace, in 2005. Mr. Murdoch has conceded that his company “proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way,” ultimately selling the company in 2011 to a group of investors that included Justin Timberlake for just $35 million. The company that acquired it, Viant, an ad technology firm, describes the move on its website as being motiviated by the consumer data Myspace offered. In early 2016, the publisher Time Inc., bought Viant for $87 million. The following year, Meredith Corporation, a media conglomerate, announced plans to buy Time. In a regulatory filing related to that deal, Time laid out its intellectual property, which it said included consumer data, and e-mail addresses, for about 250 million unique Myspace users in the United States. And Myspace may change hands again. After Meredith Corporation acquired Time Inc., last year, it put Viant up for sale.