Who owns Myspace? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Myspace is the clearest example in modern technology of what happens when the asset disappears but the company survives. In 2008 it was the most visited website in the United States, with 115 million monthly visitors and roughly $800 million of annual revenue. In 2026 it is a music news page owned by an advertising software company that does not mention it in its financial results.

The ownership trail explains the collapse better than any product post-mortem. Myspace was never independent. It was built inside another company, sold to a media conglomerate that paid $580 million for it, sold again six years later for a fraction of that, and then passed through two magazine publishers before returning to the advertising executives who had bought it in the first place. None of its owners has ever been a social network operator.

Understanding who owns Myspace matters because the current owner is a public company with disclosure obligations, which makes this one of the few cases where the fate of a dead social network is documented in securities filings. Those filings show Myspace as a subsidiary, a patent portfolio, and a legal liability. This article traces every transfer, what each buyer paid, and why the people who own it now say they want to bring it back.

Myspace launched on August 1, 2003, built in roughly ten days by employees of eUniverse, a Los Angeles internet company later renamed Intermix Media. The project was overseen by eUniverse founder Brad Greenspan and staffed by Chris DeWolfe, who became Myspace's first chief executive, Tom Anderson, its first president and the default friend on every new account, along with Josh Berman, Jon Hart, and a team of eUniverse engineers. Founding credit has been disputed for two decades, a direct consequence of the site being created inside an existing company rather than by a startup with a cap table.

The product copied Friendster's social features with one important difference: users could edit their own profile code. That turned personal pages into customized, chaotic, and often unreadable displays of taste, and it made Myspace the place where music was discovered. Unsigned bands uploaded tracks directly and built audiences there before they had labels.

The growth was fast and the money followed. In June 2006 Myspace passed Yahoo Mail and Google Search to become the most visited website in the United States. That August it signed an advertising deal with Google guaranteeing $900 million over three years in exchange for exclusive rights to search results and sponsored links on the site, worth more than half again what News Corporation had paid for the whole business a year earlier. Search advertising was already the most reliable revenue engine on the internet, and it remains the foundation of how Google makes money today. Myspace generated roughly $800 million of revenue in fiscal 2008 and employed about 1,600 people in mid-2009.

Then it lost. Facebook passed Myspace in United States unique visitors in May 2009 and never gave the lead back. Today Myspace is a website rather than a business. It has been in read-only mode since October 5, 2024, with most user images broken and uploaded music no longer playing. Its owner does not report revenue, users, or headcount for it.

Myspace is a wholly owned subsidiary of Viant Technology Inc., which has traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker DSP since February 10, 2021. The corporate entity is Myspace LLC, incorporated in Delaware, and it is listed alongside Adelphic LLC, IRIS.TV LLC, Viant Technology LLC, and Viant US LLC in the subsidiary exhibit to Viant's annual report for the 2025 financial year, filed on March 11, 2026.

That makes Myspace unusual among defunct social networks. Its owner has to describe it in public filings. Viant's annual report states plainly that it acquired Myspace LLC in 2011, that it owns intellectual property related to Myspace.com, and that 15 of its issued patents relate to the site. It also devotes a full risk factor to the liabilities that come with owning it.

Viant itself is an advertising technology company. It sells a demand-side platform that marketers and agencies use to plan, buy, and measure digital advertising, particularly on connected television. It is headquartered in Irvine, California, and had approximately 380 employees across ten United States offices at the end of 2025. Myspace is not a business line inside that company. It is an asset on the balance sheet.

No Myspace founder holds equity in Myspace today, and none held meaningful equity for long. Because the site was created inside eUniverse rather than as a standalone startup, its creators were employees of a parent company from the first day. There were no founder shares in a Myspace entity to hold.

Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson were compensated through the parent, and both left in 2009 after News Corporation replaced the leadership. Neither holds any stake in Viant, and neither appears in its filings.

The one publicly named individual investor is Justin Timberlake, who took an ownership position alongside Specific Media in the 2011 purchase and was given a formal creative role. Neither the size of that stake nor its current status has ever been disclosed. He does not appear as a beneficial owner in Viant Technology Inc.'s filings, and there is no public evidence that he retains a position. What is confirmed is that he held a stake in 2011. Anything beyond that is not established.

Myspace has never raised a venture round. It has no Series A, no institutional investors of its own, and no funding history in the conventional sense. Its capital history is a sequence of sales, and the direction of travel is the story.

Two figures define the table. News Corporation paid $580 million in July 2005 and sold for a reported $35 million in June 2011, a loss of roughly 94% of the purchase price in six years. That is why Myspace is cited as a cautionary example rather than a case study.

Viant Technology Inc. uses a dual-class structure, which is what determines who actually controls Myspace. As of March 10, 2026, there were 17,755,759 Class A shares outstanding, traded publicly, and 45,597,216 Class B shares held by four holders of record. Class B shares carry no economic rights at all. They carry votes.

The result is that the Vanderhook Parties, defined in Viant's filings as Tim Vanderhook, Chris Vanderhook, and Capital V LLC, controlled approximately 69% of the voting power of Viant's common stock in the election of directors as of December 31, 2025. Viant states in its own annual report that it qualifies as a "controlled company" under Nasdaq listing standards and relies on exemptions from certain corporate governance requirements as a result.

Public Class A shareholders therefore own the economics of Myspace without controlling it. Institutional asset managers hold Class A stock the way index and small-cap funds hold any Nasdaq listing, but no outside shareholder can outvote the founding family. The float is small, with a reported public equity value of approximately $185.1 million as of the middle of 2025, which keeps most large institutions at the margins.

Viant operates as a single reportable segment, so it does not disclose Myspace revenue, users, or costs. Everything rolls into one advertising business. For scale, Viant reported $344.2 million of revenue and $24.1 million of net income for the full 2025 financial year, and $88.5 million of revenue in the first quarter of 2026, up 25% year over year.

The company's active investment is going elsewhere. It acquired the contextual video data company IRIS.TV in November 2024 and closed the acquisition of the television attention measurement firm TVision Insights on May 5, 2026 for $39.3 million, comprising $22.5 million in cash and 1.65 million Class A shares. Neither purchase has anything to do with social networking. What Myspace contributes, on the evidence of the filings, is a patent portfolio and a brand. Neither shows up as a line of revenue.

Tim Vanderhook, 45, is chief executive officer and chairman of Viant Technology Inc. He co-founded Viant in 1999 with his brothers Chris and Russ, bought Myspace in 2011, and has run the parent company through every subsequent ownership change. In the 2026 documentary Myspace, directed by Tommy Avallone, he said: "We still own Myspace. We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace." He added that the company is "just waiting for the right time to do it."

Chris Vanderhook, 47, is chief operating officer and a director. Together with Tim and Capital V LLC he forms the control bloc that holds the Class B shares. Larry Madden, 61, is chief financial officer. The three independent directors listed as of March 11, 2026 are Max Valdes, former chief financial officer and executive vice president of First American Financial Corporation, Vivian Yang, former chief legal officer of The Trade Desk, and Brett Wilson, co-founder and general partner at Swift Ventures and a co-founder of TubeMogul.

Myspace itself has no chief executive, no board, and no separate management. That is the practical meaning of its ownership: decisions about the site are made by the executives of an advertising company, weighed against every other use of that company's engineering budget.

What is confirmed is the control structure, the board composition, and the stated intention to relaunch. What is not confirmed is any timeline, product plan, or budget. Tim Vanderhook's own framing, that if a relaunch does not work they will try again, describes an ambition rather than a project.

In March 2019 Myspace confirmed that a server migration project had destroyed every photo, video, and audio file uploaded to the site before 2016. The scale was estimated at more than 50 million songs from roughly 14 million artists, covering uploads from 2003 to 2015. The company's notice to users read: "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace." Asked whether recovery was possible, Myspace said there was none.

Artists had noticed missing tracks as early as 2018 and had been told the company was investigating. The loss became widely known only when the technology writer Andy Baio drew attention to it in March 2019. Baio was openly skeptical, writing that flagrant incompetence "may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than 'we can't be bothered with the effort and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s.'" No evidence has established that the deletion was deliberate, and the company has never described it as anything other than an accident.

Viant's own annual report acknowledges the incident in muted terms, noting that "as a result of a server migration project in 2019, older photo, video or audio files of some users were lost." The material point for ownership is what was destroyed: a decade of independent music that existed nowhere else, held by a company whose actual business was advertising software. The archive had no revenue attached to it, and hosting it cost money. That is the risk when a cultural archive sits inside a business with no commercial reason to preserve it. Music discovery moved to platforms with a direct financial stake in keeping catalogues online, which is central to how Spotify makes money.

Shortly after Viant acquired Myspace LLC in late 2011, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into the entity's privacy practices between 2008 and 2010. The 2012 settlement produced a consent order barring Myspace LLC from misrepresenting how it protects users' personal information or its compliance with any privacy program. The order also requires the company to maintain a comprehensive privacy program and to obtain independent third-party assessments of it every two years for twenty years.

That order does not expire until August 2032. Viant lists it as a risk factor, noting that failure to comply could expose the company to regulatory investigations, monetary fines, and forced changes to its business practices. This is the clearest illustration of Myspace as a liability rather than an asset. Viant inherited a twenty-year federal compliance obligation attached to conduct that occurred before it owned the company, and it will carry that obligation for six more years.

In 2016 Viant discovered that a third party had stolen usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords from the Myspace platform as it existed before June 11, 2013. Approximately 360 million account records were later offered for sale. Analysis of the data suggested the underlying breach occurred around mid-2008 to early 2009, meaning it sat undetected for roughly seven years across two changes of ownership.

The compromise happened under News Corporation. It was discovered and disclosed under Viant, during the period when Time Inc. held the majority stake. Viant continues to list it as a risk factor a decade later. Data liabilities transfer with the corporate entity regardless of who was running the business when the failure occurred.

Viant's dual-class structure gives the Vanderhook Parties approximately 69% of the voting power while the Class B shares that carry those votes have no economic rights. Public shareholders supply the capital and take the economic risk. Two brothers make the decisions.

This is legal, disclosed, and common among founder-led technology listings. Viant identifies it openly as a risk factor, noting that insiders have substantial control that could limit shareholders' ability to influence key decisions including a change of control. The board is classified into three staggered classes, and directors can only be removed for cause while the Vanderhooks retain their majority. For Myspace, this means a decision to relaunch it, sell it, or shut it down does not require shareholder agreement.

Myspace is the rare case where ownership does not just shape the outcome, it is the outcome. The site was never a company with its own board, its own investors, or its own balance sheet. It was a product line inside eUniverse, then a division of News Corporation, then an asset attached to an advertising network, then a line item inside a magazine publisher, then a subsidiary of a Nasdaq-listed advertising technology firm. At no point did anyone own Myspace whose primary business was running Myspace.

That absence explains the value destruction better than competition from Facebook does. News Corporation bought a growing social network in 2005 and installed media executives to run it, treating audience as inventory to be sold rather than a product to be improved. By the time Facebook was winning, decisions about Myspace were being made by people whose incentives ran through a television and newspaper conglomerate. The company that beat it was founder-controlled and focused on one thing, a structural contrast that still defines who owns Meta today.

For the current owner, the calculation is straightforward. Viant is a profitable advertising technology company growing at 25% in its most recent quarter, competing for connected television budgets and buying measurement companies. Myspace does not help with any of that. It costs something to host, carries a federal consent order until 2032, and brings breach liability from events that predate Viant's ownership. Keeping it is a decision about a brand and a patent portfolio, not about a product.

For users, the ownership history is the reason a generation of uploaded music no longer exists. Nobody in the chain of custody had a commercial reason to preserve it, and in 2019 nobody did. The Vanderhooks have now held the asset for fifteen years without selling it, longer than any previous owner, so the stated intention to relaunch should be taken seriously. But a relaunch would be funded by a public company answerable to Class A shareholders who bought an advertising business, competing for attention in a market now shaped by platforms like TikTok. The brand is available. The archive that made it matter is not.

Myspace is owned by Viant Technology Inc., a public advertising technology company listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker DSP. Myspace LLC is listed as a wholly owned Delaware subsidiary in Viant's annual report for the 2025 financial year, filed in March 2026. Voting control of Viant sits with brothers Tim and Chris Vanderhook and their entity Capital V LLC, who together controlled roughly 69% of the voting power as of December 31, 2025.

Myspace launched on August 1, 2003 inside eUniverse, later renamed Intermix Media. Chris DeWolfe became its first chief executive and Tom Anderson its first president, working alongside Josh Berman, Jon Hart, and a team of eUniverse engineers under the oversight of eUniverse founder Brad Greenspan. Because the site was built inside an existing company, founding credit has been contested for two decades. None of the original team holds any stake or role today.

There is no Myspace stock. The only way to own an economic interest in Myspace is to own Class A shares of Viant Technology Inc. on the Nasdaq. Even then, Myspace results are not broken out: Viant operates as a single reportable segment and discloses no Myspace revenue, users, or costs.

News Corporation acquired Myspace in July 2005 by buying its parent, Intermix Media, for $580 million. It sold the business in June 2011 to Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake for a reported $35 million, a decline of roughly 94% in six years. Time Inc.'s 2016 purchase of a 60% stake in the parent company was reported at $87 million.

Justin Timberlake took an ownership stake alongside Specific Media in the June 2011 purchase and was given a creative role in the business. The size of that stake was never disclosed, and its current status is not public. He does not appear as a beneficial owner in Viant Technology Inc.'s filings, so there is no public evidence he retains a position today.

Myspace.com is still online, but it has been in read-only mode since October 5, 2024. Most user images are broken, uploaded music no longer plays, and the site now serves music news articles. In a 2026 documentary directed by Tommy Avallone, Tim Vanderhook confirmed continued ownership and said the company intends to relaunch the platform, adding that it is waiting for the right time. No date, budget, or product plan has been announced.