The Summer MySpace Passed Google

By the summer of 2006 you did not check MySpace. You lived on it.

In May of that year, comScore measured more than 50 million unique visitors to MySpace in the United States alone. For a strange, brief stretch, MySpace was the most-visited website in the country — ahead of Google Search, ahead of Yahoo Mail, ahead of every property that had defined the web up to that point. This is the year MySpace stopped being a startup and became, for a lot of people, the internet itself.

The numbers

The growth curve in 2006 stopped looking like a product and started looking like weather. New accounts arrived at a rate measured in hundreds of thousands per day. Page views ran into the billions per month. Hitwise, which measured share of U.S. visits rather than unique visitors, put MySpace at number one — a headline that got repeated everywhere because it was the first time a social network had topped a search engine on any credible metric.

Numbers that large do two things at once. They make you feel invincible, and they make your infrastructure bill terrifying. Both were true inside MySpace in 2006.

The Google deal

In August 2006, Google agreed to provide search and advertising across Fox Interactive Media's properties, MySpace foremost among them, in a deal reported at roughly $900 million over roughly three years, with guaranteed minimum payments tied to traffic targets.

Read that structure carefully, because it explains the next five years. The money was not a gift. It was contingent on MySpace continuing to deliver traffic and continuing to show ads against it. A revenue guarantee is also a revenue obligation.

Analysis: the Google agreement is usually filed under "MySpace's biggest win," and financially it was. Strategically it was the moment the platform's incentives inverted. Before the deal, MySpace made money because people used it. After the deal, MySpace had committed to page-view and monetization targets it now had to hit. Every subsequent decision that made the site heavier — more ad units, more interstitials, more pages to click through for the same task — is downstream of a contract signed in a good year.

What the product actually did

Very little, comparatively. 2006's product story is mostly scale: video, which arrived to compete with a year-old YouTube; bulletins and groups maturing; the classifieds and events surfaces expanding; and an enormous, grinding effort to keep the servers standing.

Meanwhile a competitor spent 2006 doing something MySpace did not do. In September, Facebook opened registration to anyone over thirteen with an email address, and shipped the News Feed — an aggregated stream of what your connections were doing, which users initially hated and then could not live without.

MySpace's unit was still the page. Facebook's unit was now the feed. Nobody in 2006 could have told you which would win, and most people would have guessed wrong.

The people

Chris DeWolfe ran the business, negotiating with News Corp on one side and Google on the other. Tom Anderson remained president and the human face of a site with tens of millions of members, most of whom still had him in their friends list by default. Rupert Murdoch, a year into ownership, had a property that looked like the best acquisition in modern media.

The internal reporting from this period, most thoroughly in Julia Angwin's *Stealing MySpace*, describes an operation running permanently hot: revenue targets rising, headcount and infrastructure lagging, and a founder team increasingly negotiating with its own parent company for the resources to build.

What it felt like

It felt enormous. Bands broke on MySpace. Comedians broke on MySpace. Political campaigns opened profiles. Your Top 8 was a social document with consequences. If something happened in youth culture in 2006, it happened here first and got reported on afterward.

It also, quietly, started to feel slower. More ads. More load time. More of the page belonging to somebody who was not you.

Why this matters in 2026

The MySpace of 2006 is the strongest evidence we have that scale and health are different variables. The platform had never had more users, more revenue, or more cultural authority than it did that summer, and the decisions that ended it were being made in the same twelve months.

The current owners describe wanting something less algorithmic. 2006 is the year worth pointing at when they say it — not because MySpace was well run, but because it was the last moment a mass social platform organized itself around pages people made rather than streams people were served.