EntreLeadership - The Rise and Fall of Myspace

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Success today doesn’t guarantee you’ll still matter tomorrow.  In this episode, learn the three mistakes that took Myspace from the most visited website in America to nearly irrelevant—and how to avoid making those same mistakes in your business. Next Steps: • 🎥 Watch our video What Really Killed Spirit Airlines? (It Wasn’t Fuel Prices). • 📚 Order Dave’s most recent EntreLeadership® book, Build a Business You Love. • 🎯 Not sure what to do next in your business? Let’s figure it out together. Book a free 30-minute consult call with the EntreLeadership Team. • 📞 Have a question for the show? Call 844-944-1070 or send us a message. • 📧 Get EntreLeadership’s free weekly newsletter: expert advice and practical tips from the same playbook we used to build Ramsey Solutions into a $300 million company. • 🌎 Attend our world-class leadership conference, EntreLeadership Summit. • 📝 Stop guessing. Get a plan built for your business and someone who holds you to it. Find out which coaching option is right for you. • 📈 Bad hires. Strategies that never get off the ground. 60-hour workweeks. Sleepless nights. EntreLeadership Master Series is where you trade all that for the exact systems our Executive Team used to scale Ramsey Solutions to $300 million. Don’t wait until seats are sold out.   Connect With Our Sponsors: • Go to BELAY Solutions or text ENTRE to 55123 for their free resource! • See if Christian Healthcare Ministries Groups are the right fit for your organization. • Visit NetSuite today to learn more.   Listen to More From Ramsey Network: 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💰 George Kamel   Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2006, the most visited website in America was MySpace. It wasn't Yahoo, it wasn't eBay, not even Google, but just five years later, News Corp sold MySpace for $35 million, a fraction of the $580 million it had paid for it. So how does one of the biggest websites in the world become irrelevant that fast? There are three huge reasons MySpace disappeared. and none of them were Facebook. But it was these three mistakes that opened the door

for Facebook to take over. But we need to back up here for a second, because if you're under a certain age or over a certain age, as in my case, the name MySpace might not mean much to you. Back in the early 2000s, it was the place to show people who you were online. You could customize your page, post pictures,

write blog posts, and even choose a song that automatically played played on your profile. And then there was the infamous top eight. These were the coveted eight spots on your profile where you told the world who your closest friends were. Music was also a huge part of MySpace. And many of the artists you know today were discovered on that platform.

After launching in 2003, this online community quickly became one of the hottest properties on the internet. So much so that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought MySpace in 2005 for 500,000, and $80 million. And by the end of 2006, they had over 100 million accounts. Pretty much looked unstoppable. But behind the scenes, they were making decisions that would make it really easy for a competitor,

like Facebook, to eat their lunch. The first mistake was they put revenue ahead of the customer. When NewsCorp acquired MySpace in 2005, it had something every business wanted. Attention. There was a lot of money to be made by putting ads in front of that massive audience. Google agreed to pay them at least $900 million

over the next couple of years to put its search and ads across the platform. That meant that MySpace had more ads, more clutter, slower pages, and over time, the things that people loved about the site started taking a backseat to monetizing all that attention. That's the trap a lot of businesses have to watch out for. MySpace needed to make money.

Every business does, but it shouldn't be at the expense of the customer experience. It comes down to the Entree leadership principle that we call Marketplace Service. We believe that if you help enough people, you don't have to worry about the money. Rabbi Daniel Lapin says that when you serve your customers well, they will give you certificates of appreciation

with President's faces on them. The more value you create for people, the more of those certificates you're going to earn. So making money is a good thing. But if you start to worry about the money more than the people you're serving, you've got the order backwards. So it's good to ask yourself, what are we asking our customers to deal with because it helps our bottom line?

Maybe it's an extra fee or a frustrating policy. Maybe it's a slow process nobody's bothered to fix because that's just how we do it, whatever it is. Don't assume your customers will put up with it forever. If you want customers to keep coming back, and keep paying you, you have to keep giving them an experience worth coming back for. That's where MySpace messed up. Because while they were sacrificing the customer experience for ad revenue, Facebook was busy making its product much better. And that leads us to mistake number two.

They stopped trying to build a better product. Remember, MySpace had every advantage. They had the users, they had the brand recognition, the money, the momentum. But having a head start only matters, if you keep moving. And former MySpace leaders said the team had less freedom to experiment because changes could hurt page views and cost them advertising dollars. So even when the user experience needed work, they were told to protect the traffic they already had above all else. And one of the things that made them so popular in the first place,

the customization started to work against them. Giving users so much freedom to design their own pages made things for feel personal and creative, but it also contributed to clutter and slow pages and overall just a messy experience. Meanwhile, Facebook's engineers were constantly improving their site. Instead of letting every user design the experience, Facebook gave everyone a cleaner, more consistent profile. And they kept rolling out features that made connecting with other people easier. So while MySpace was trying to protect what it already had, Facebook was busy building something better. And little by little, that consistency started winning.

By 2008, Facebook had overtaken MySpace globally. And when MySpace finally realized how serious the threat was, it was too late. There's a powerful temptation to protect what's already working. When you're the top dog, it's easy to think, why mess with a good thing? You get comfortable doing things the way you've always done them. But when you're the underdog, you experiment. You look for a better way. Great leaders keep that underdog mindset, even when they're winning.

They're willing to challenge their current thinking and improve what's already working. So you've got to ask yourself, what needs to change before the market forces us to change it? We call this proactive disruption. As a business owner, you've got to break it before it's broken. That doesn't mean you need to chase every new trend or change just for the sake of it. Hold tight to the principles that made your business. business great, but stay willing to change how you deliver them. Keep looking for ways to get better today, or you may wake up in five years and realize the market has moved on without you. And if I was

sitting right across from you right now, I would ask you, where have you gotten a little too comfortable because something is working so well? And are you regularly talking to customers about what they want and what frustrates them? Are you giving your team permission to experiment and what would you change about your business today if you knew your biggest competitor was already working on something better. You've got to keep challenging what's working today so you're ready for what your customers need tomorrow. And to do that, you need to have time to actually work on your business.

That's hard to do when half of your day gets eaten up by email and scheduling and meeting notes, follow-ups and all the other administrative work that somebody else could be doing. That's why I recommend Belay. You can connect you with an executive assistant based in the U.S. who can take those day-to-day tasks off your plate. And if you need more support, a B'A operations assistant can help document your processes, keep projects moving, and organize customer information so you can spend more time actually leading and growing your business.

Plus, Bale takes the time to understand what your business really needs so they can match you with the right assistant. So if you're ready to get more out of your day, text Entree to 55123 to download B'A's free guide, 20 Ways and Operation Assistant will save you time and money, or click the link in the description. Okay, MySpace' third mistake. They got too comfortable with their success. At its peak in 2008, they had roughly 115 million visitors a month worldwide. This Corp had predicted that they would bring in about $800 million in revenue that year,

and they were one of the biggest names on the internet. So from leadership's perspective, things looked pretty good, but at the same time, there were signs that things were starting to go wrong. The team was raising concerns. Users were getting frustrated, and Facebook was catching up. But those problems are really easy to ignore when the numbers are up, and that's where complacency creeps in. Success can make problems feel a whole lot less urgent than they really are.

You may not be running a huge tech company, but this can happen in your business too. Maybe you keep hearing the same customer complaint, but sales are still good, so you just brush it off. One of your best employees is frustrated, but they haven't quit, so you figure everything's fine. A competitor starts doing something better than you, but your customers haven't left yet, so you don't worry about it. You start assuming that because you're winning today, you'll keep winning tomorrow. But the truth is, you don't own your stage of business. You rent it, and the rent is due every day.

You don't get to check out and put the business on autopilot. That's when you need to lean in even more. So keep your finger on the pulse of your business. Keep talking to your customers. Pay attention to what your team is telling you. Know what's happening in your numbers, and keep an eye on what's changing in your business, and keep an eye on what's changing in your industry.

You also need people around you who are willing to say, hey, we've got a problem. Even when everything else seems to be going great, and when they do point out the problems, you've got to be humble enough to actually listen to them. Because of all you're willing to hear is the good news, eventually you're going to get blindsided by the bad news. Now, technically, MySpace never disappeared completely.

After all, you know, the internet lives forever. But now, more than 20 years after the site launched, the current owners, Chris and Tim Vanderhook, say they want to bring it back. They acquired the company with Justin Timberlake back in 2011, and they tried to reinvent the platform without much success. But the Vanderhook brothers made it clear. They're not finished. They said they still own the brand and intend to relaunch it when the timing is right.

There's no official date for that yet. So we'll see if this is an actual comeback or another failed reboot. But if MySpace really does get another shot, they need to earn those customers all over again. And they'll also have to fix the very things they refuse to fix the first time around. So if you want to stay in the game, even as the marketplace changes, you need to do three things. You've got to serve your customers, not just your short-term revenue.

You've got to keep improving, even when what you're doing is currently working, And you've got to fight complacency, even when the numbers say you're winning, because every stage of business brings a new set of problems, and what got you here won't always get you there. That's exactly why Dave Ramsey wrote his book, Build a Business you love.

It walks you through the different stages of business, the problems that come with each one, and what you need to focus on to level up. Just click the link in the description to grab a copy. And if you like learning from the mistakes of other businesses will buckle up because Spirit Airlines has plenty of lessons for us too. So go watch this next video where we break down exactly what happened to the budget airline. We'll leave a link in the description.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, share, and subscribe for more real-world business content. Thanks for watching Entree Leadership. Now go get them.