MySpace as a Data Asset Inside a Publisher

In January 2018, Meredith Corporation completed its acquisition of Time Inc. MySpace changed hands for the fifth time, and this time it was not even a footnote in the coverage.

The transaction

Meredith, a publisher built on titles like *Better Homes & Gardens* and *Family Circle*, bought Time Inc. in a deal valued around $2.8 billion with financing from Koch Equity Development. The rationale was scale in magazine publishing and advertising.

MySpace arrived inside that deal as part of Viant, itself inside Time Inc. Nobody bought MySpace in 2018. MySpace was simply present in a portfolio that moved.

Later that year Meredith began divesting assets that did not fit the core publishing business, and in February 2019 Viant's management — the Vanderhooks — repurchased the company, taking MySpace back into private ownership under the founders' family business.

Analysis: trace the ownership chain and a pattern emerges. eUniverse/Intermix, News Corporation, Specific Media, Time Inc., Meredith, and back to the Vanderhooks. In four of those six transitions MySpace was not the thing being bought — it came along attached to something else. From 2011 onward the only people who ever deliberately wanted MySpace are the brothers who now own it. That is either the most sentimental fact in this history or the most commercially rational one, depending on how much you believe an identity graph is worth, and it is probably both.

The product year

Minimal. The site remained online, the music catalogue remained available, artist pages continued to serve. Traffic came predominantly from search — people looking up an old band, an old profile, a song they could not find anywhere else.

MySpace in 2018 was doing something no other property from its era was doing: continuing to exist, unmodified, under continuous ownership, with its historical material still addressable at its original URLs. That is genuinely rare on the internet, and it was about to become much less true.

What it felt like

Like nothing, again. If you visited MySpace in 2018 it was almost certainly because a link brought you there, and you almost certainly did not visit twice.

Why this matters in 2026

2018 is the year to point at when someone argues that MySpace's survival was an accident. It was not. It survived because a specific family business kept choosing to own it through a chain of transactions in which it was, to everyone else involved, an afterthought.

Whatever the relaunch turns out to be, the people announcing it are the only people in this entire story who ever bought MySpace on purpose twice.