Myspace Could Be Making a Comeback — and Millennials Are Not Ready

The site's owners have hinted that a relaunch is on the way, according to comments made in a new documentary and picked up when Metro reported the story. If it actually happens, it would rank among the more unlikely revivals in the short, brutal history of the social web — a corner of the internet where platforms tend to die quietly and stay dead.

Why Myspace still matters

Founded in 2003, a year before Facebook, Myspace was once one of the most popular websites on the planet. At its peak it boasted more than 10 million users in the UK alone, functioning as the online equivalent of a teenager's bedroom — a place to broadcast your taste, your mood and your friendship hierarchy to anyone who would look.

For those who lived through it, the details are seared into memory. Profiles were rammed with garish GIFs, sparkly bubble text and carefully curated playlists that announced exactly what kind of person you were trying to be. And then there was the top eight: the ruthless, friendship-ending business of publicly ranking your closest mates for all to see. It was clumsy, chaotic and deeply personal in a way that the polished feeds of today rarely are.

Then came the fall. As Facebook, and later Instagram and TikTok, hoovered up attention and advertising, the platform plummeted in relevance and slid quietly out of the cultural conversation. For years it existed mostly as a punchline and a cautionary tale about how quickly the internet moves on. Chris and Tim Vanderhook bought the flailing website back in 2011, and it is the brothers who now say they are ready to bring it back.

What the owners have said

Speaking in an upcoming documentary — titled, fittingly, Myspace — Chris Vanderhook confirmed the brand is still in their hands and that a revival is the plan.

We still own Myspace. We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace.

Chris Vanderhook

Details of what a new platform would actually look like remain thin, and there is no confirmed launch date. A relaunch would also arrive into a landscape almost unrecognisable from the one it once dominated, with regulators and parents increasingly focused on the way we use social media and the platforms young people are allowed to access. Any comeback would have to answer a simple question: what is Myspace actually for in an era already saturated with places to post?

Whether nostalgia is enough to tempt millennials back to their first digital home is another question entirely. Reboots trade heavily on affection for the past, and there is plenty of that here — but affection does not always translate into daily use. For anyone who spent their teenage years agonising over that top eight, though, the mere possibility is likely to stir something: equal parts excitement and secondhand embarrassment, and perhaps a quiet urge to check whether that old profile is still out there somewhere.