The $35M Fire Sale to Specific Media

On June 29, 2011, News Corporation sold MySpace to Specific Media for approximately $35 million.

Six years earlier it had paid roughly $580 million. The sale price was about six cents on the dollar. Rupert Murdoch later described the acquisition, with characteristic economy, as a huge mistake.

The deal

Specific Media was an online advertising network run by three brothers — Tim, Chris, and Russell Vanderhook — based in Irvine, California. They were not a media conglomerate and did not pretend to be. They bought MySpace as an audience and data asset that fit an advertising business they already operated.

Attached to the deal, and to most of the coverage of it, was Justin Timberlake, who took an ownership stake and an active creative role. The framing was irresistible to headline writers: the star of *The Social Network* buying the social network the film's subject had beaten.

Reporting at the time put MySpace's remaining staff at around 500 people, down from a peak in the region of 1,600. Layoffs followed the sale almost immediately.

Analysis: the $35 million number is quoted as a humiliation, and it was, but it also marks the moment MySpace's ownership finally matched its actual situation. News Corp needed MySpace to be a mass platform because it had paid mass-platform money. The Vanderhooks needed it to be a profitable niche property with useful data, which is exactly what it was. Almost everything MySpace has done since — surviving, quietly, for over a decade under the same owners — is only possible because the price got reset to something the business could support.

What Timberlake actually did

More than the cynics expected and less than the press releases implied. He was involved in the creative direction of the redesign that would preview the following year, appeared in its marketing, and gave the property something it had lacked since 2009: a reason for anyone to write about it.

The strategic logic was coherent. MySpace's last defensible territory was music and artists. Timberlake was a credible figure in exactly that territory. If you were going to attempt a relaunch, this was the right co-signer.

The people

Mike Jones exited as CEO shortly after the sale. Tim Vanderhook took over as chief executive, with Chris Vanderhook as chief operating officer — roles they still hold over the parent company today. Tom Anderson, two years out of the company, had begun the second act he still maintains: landscape and travel photography, published to an audience of hundreds of thousands, with no apparent interest in running anything again.

What it felt like

Like reading an obituary for something you had already stopped visiting. The 2011 sale generated more coverage than MySpace's actual product had generated in two years, and almost all of it was retrospective. The story was not what MySpace would do next. The story was how far it had fallen.

Why this matters in 2026

Everything currently being said about a MySpace relaunch traces back to this deal. The Vanderhooks who are talking about bringing it back are the same brothers who bought it in 2011 and have owned it, through Specific Media and then Viant, ever since.

That continuity is the most underrated fact in MySpace's history. The platform has had one consistent ownership group for fifteen years — longer than News Corp, longer than the founders themselves. Whatever comes next is not a stranger buying a nostalgic brand. It is the people who have been quietly paying the hosting bill since the fire sale.