The Month Facebook Overtakes MySpace in the U.S.

In 2009 the crossover reached the United States, and MySpace stopped pretending it had a plan.

Depending on which measurement firm you trusted, sometime in the middle of 2009 Facebook passed MySpace in U.S. unique visitors. Globally it had already happened. Domestically, this was the one that mattered — America was MySpace's home market, its advertising base, and its identity.

The management year

2009 was, above all, a personnel year.

In April, News Corp installed Owen Van Natta — previously a senior Facebook executive — as MySpace's chief executive. Chris DeWolfe stepped down as CEO. Tom Anderson stepped down as president shortly afterward, ending the founders' operational involvement in the company they had built six years earlier.

In June the company announced layoffs of roughly 30 percent of its U.S. workforce, followed by deep cuts internationally. The public rationale was that MySpace had been staffed for a growth curve that no longer existed. That was true, and it was also an admission.

Van Natta lasted until February 2010.

Analysis: the turnover of 2009 is often read as News Corp panicking. It is better read as a category error finally becoming visible. News Corp had bought an audience and staffed it like a media property: sales-heavy, editorially organized, measured on inventory. Facebook was staffed like a software company: engineering-heavy, measured on retention. When the numbers turned, News Corp's instinct was to change the executive, because in media the executive is the strategy. In software the architecture is the strategy, and MySpace's architecture — millions of pages of unconstrained user markup wrapped in a monetization contract — could not be replaced by a hire.

What the product did

Consolidated. MySpace narrowed toward music and entertainment, the one area where it still had genuine, defensible strength. Artists were on it. Labels used it. Discovery still happened there.

That narrowing was strategically correct and existentially fatal. A social network that decides it is really a music site has told its non-music users, which is most of them, that they are welcome to leave. They did.

What it felt like

It felt like a bar that had gotten quiet. You would log in, see the same profiles you had seen for years, note that nobody had posted a bulletin in months, and go back to the other tab. Nobody announced they were leaving MySpace. They just stopped arriving.

The last thing most people did on MySpace was not delete their account. It was nothing at all.

Why this matters in 2026

2009 is the year the founders left and the year the audience did, and those facts sit closer together than they look. The default friend was the product's soul, and once Tom was neither the president nor, before long, even the default connection, the platform had nothing left that Facebook could not do better.

Any relaunch inherits this lesson: what MySpace had was never the feature list. It was a specific relationship between the people who built it and the people who lived on it. That is much harder to rebuild than a UI.