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From 2007: "Will MySpace Ever Lose Its Monopoly?"[1] Past performance does not beget future success. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/b

• varjag 9y ago
  2007 was 11 years ago. That's glacial on tech timescale.
• adventured 9y ago
  MySpace prospered for four years, that's it. And by prospered I mean, never made money, never became self-sustaining at all. Facebook is still expanding in its 15th year. MySpace never earned a profit pre Fox acquisition (the Google deal gave it a one time bump). In historical terms, MySpace is barely a bump in the road, about the size of an Ask.fm type service (ie trivial in today's hyper scale). It's like looking back and thinking Excite was a juggernaut and therefore a supporting piece of evidence that Google is going to die soon. Facebook will earn ~$20 billion in 2018 and will end the year with $50 billion in cash. That's 86 times what MySpace sold to Fox for. MySpace peaked in size at a mere 75 million monthly active users. Facebook is nearly 30 times larger. MySpace then is to Facebook now, what AltaVista at its peak is to Google today.
• chrisco255 9y ago
  That doesn't mean that creating a new social network automatically besets the network effects of the most dominant platforms. I realize that platforms sometimes get replaced. It is early days for crypto, to be sure. It certainly hasn't reached maturity yet. However, there are examples of other monopolies (AT&T, Microsoft, GE, etc) that have lasted for many decades.