Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe

Creators of MySpace.com

Tom Anderson born October 13, 1975; son of an entrepreneur. Chris DeWolfe born c. 1967; son of teachers; married; children: one. Education: Anderson: University of California—Berkeley, B.A., 1998; University of California—Los Angeles, M.F.A., 2000. DeWolfe: University of Washington, B.A.; University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, M.B.A.

Addresses: Office—MySpace/Fox Interactive Media, 407 N. Maple Dr., Beverly Hills, CA 90210.

Career

Anderson was the vocalist for Swank, a San Francisco rock band, late 1990s, then joined Xdrive Technologies as a marketing department copyeditor, 2000; DeWolfe served as vice president of marketing for First Bank of Beverly Hills after 1997, and became vice president of sales and marketing for Xdrive Technologies in October, 1999; Xdrive Technologies went out of business in March, 2001, and DeWolfe and Anderson formed Response Base, an Internet marketing firm, later in 2001 with DeWolfe as chief executive officer; Response Base was acquired by eUniverse (later Intermix Media), September, 2002; DeWolfe and Anderson set up MySpace as a division of eUniverse, August, 2003, with DeWolfe as chief executive officer and Anderson as president; retained respective job titles when Intermix Media acquired by News Corporation, July, 2005.

Sidelights

Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe are the creators of MySpace.com, the social networking Web site launched in early 2004. Their brainchild quickly became one of the most remarkable success stories in Internet history, attracting some five million new members every month and soon overtaking Google as the Web's most visited site. Anderson serves as president of MySpace, while DeWolfe is its chief executive officer, and both remained on board after the parent company for MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in July of 2005 for $580 million. "I always thought we could take on the big-three portals," Anderson confessed to Vanity Fair writer James Verini, referring to Internet giants AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. "But in terms of our cultural relevance—turning out to be cool—we just lucked out."

The son of an entrepreneur, Anderson was born in 1975 and studied English and rhetoric at the University of California's Berkeley campus. He graduated in 1998 and went on to the University of California at Los Angeles to earn a graduate degree in film. Returning to San Francisco, he fronted a shortlived rock band called Swank. DeWolfe, the son of teachers, was born a decade earlier than Anderson, and grew up in the Portland, Oregon, area. After earning an undergraduate degree in finance from the University of Washington, he went on to the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business for his M.B.A. One of his b-school assignments involved writing a business plan for an imaginary venture, and DeWolfe devised one for possible social-networking Web site he named Sitegeist.

Anderson and DeWolfe met in 2000, when Anderson was in need of some cash and answered an ad for product testers for Xdrive, an online data-storage provider. DeWolfe was head of sales and marketing for the company, and after Anderson tested the newest version, he told DeWolfe in specific terms why the product was so unsatisfactory from a user's standpoint. Appreciating the concise criticism, DeWolfe offered Anderson a marketing job with the company, which the latter claimed "rescued me from a lifetime of unemployment," Anderson told Patricia Sellers in Fortune. "I remember, I asked Chris, 'What do I do?' He said, 'Go figure out how to make money.'"

Anderson arrived at Xdrive too late to help, however, and the company declared bankruptcy in early 2001. But he and DeWolfe started their own venture soon afterward, called Response Base, a marketing firm that collected e-mail addresses. In September of 2002, the company was acquired by eUniverse, a software firm that installed spyware on unsuspecting PC users' computers; eUniverse would later change its name to Intermix Media. In a lawsuit filed a few years later by New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, "Intermix downloaded Keen-Value, which delivered pop-up ads, and Incredifind, which brought users to an Intermix search engine when the users were trying to visit another site," explained Richard J. Dalton Jr., a writer for Newsday. Intermix was also accused of distributing its problematic software, which featured unwanted toolbar installations on its victims' computers as well, via a deal with Kazaa, the music-sharing program.

Anderson and DeWolfe were already thinking ahead, however, and convinced Brad Greenspan, who was chief executive officer of eUniverse, to let them try out their idea for a new social-networking site in mid-2003. They conceived MySpace—a name DeWolfe had registered in 2002 on a lark—as a competitor to Friendster.com, the social-networking site that had become the hottest new Internet trend of 2003. Their original intent was to create a site that would enable musicians to connect with one another more easily, with a feature that enabled users to quickly upload their own music files on personal pages. Anderson utilized his own contacts in the music community to get the ball rolling, and there were thousands of users within days of MySpace's official Web launch in January of 2004. It quickly surpassed Friendster as the leading social-networking site, helped in part by one major error made by Friendster executives: that site began to restrict content, erasing some 20,000 so-called "fakester" profiles, for example, that users had created outside of their regular pages as either parodies or simply fan pages for their bands, television-show characters, or even their pets.

MySpace, by contrast, had few rules. Anyone could browse the site without registering, and the content was entirely unrestricted. In its first few months in existence, MySpace caught on with musicians and music fans, and the breakout success of two unknown British bands later in 2004, the Arctic Monkeys and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, was credited to fan pages created on MySpace that helped spread their music far more quickly than radio or live shows ever could. Even major acts like Nine Inch Nails and R.E.M. began debuting new tracks on MySpace, and the site's increasing traffic started to pique the interest of corporate marketers. The freewheeling spirit found in the MySpace community was part of its appeal, but as Anderson recounted in the Fortune interview with Sellers, it also insulated it for a time from a corporate buyout. "We'd get calls from investor types who wanted to meet us," he said. "They would say, 'Your site isn't professional. Why do you let users control the pages? They're so ugly!'"

By January of 2005, MySpace had ten million users. Every single one of them had received a welcome message from Anderson, the first-ever MySpace user. Because of that, he held the record for the most "friends" on the site. His ubiquitous presence even spawned a few pop-culture references, such as T-shirts with slogans reading "I have more friends than Tom!" or "Tom is NOT my friend!". In the lengthy Vanity Fair article about MySpace, Verini observed that MySpace had achieved "a potent social currency"; Verini went on to assert that "in the way that Google, Craigslist, and eBay have changed how people share and absorb information and goods, MySpace has changed how people, particularly young people (25 percent of users are under 18), share and absorb one another. They blog, flirt, and diarize, post pictures, videos, personal artwork, songs, and poetry, and generously distribute compliments and insults."

At one point in 2005, MySpace surged past Google, the popular search engine, in Web traffic statistics. Anderson and DeWolfe were stunned by the suc-cess of their creation. "I don't want to say it's overwhelming," Anderson confessed in August of 2005 to New York Times writer Alex Williams, "but I see these numbers coming out, I keep thinking, it must be a mistake. How can we pass Google? I mean, my mom knows Google, but she doesn't know MySpace."

With such impressive numbers, Intermix Media found it increasingly difficult to resist their corporate suitors, despite Anderson and DeWolfe's wariness. In July of 2005, MySpace's parent company was acquired by influential media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch's company, News Corporation, owns a passel of media properties, including the FOX television network, Twentieth Century-Fox film studios, and the New York Post tabloid newspaper. DeWolfe described his new boss as "a very smart guy," he told the Guardian's Owen Gibson. "He reinvented the newspaper industry. They said a fourth TV network would never work [in the US] and he did it. He's got a really good gut feeling when it comes to media."

The $580 million MySpace-News Corporation deal received an immense amount of media coverage, with most pundits heralding it as a sign that the world's most powerful media corporation was finally going to target the teenage media consumer in earnest. As David Carr wrote in the New York Times, Murdoch's empire "has found an elusive audience that is growing more indifferent to television—Where are they all? On the phone? Gaming? I.M.ing?—and would not read a newspaper if it would end world hunger." Not surprisingly, fake profiles for Murdoch began appearing on MySpace almost immediately.

Industry analysts warned that MySpace's new mainstream parent might scare off users, but traffic to the site continued to surge forward weekly. By early 2006, there were some 50 million registered users on MySpace, with 170,000 new members signing up daily. There were even a few MySpace celebrities, such as an Orange County, California, woman calling herself ForBiddeN, who had collected an astonishing 700,000 MySpace "friends," was voted "Miss Ramadi Iraq 2005" by U.S. military personnel overseas who were also MySpace users, and went on to launch her own clothing line. Even genuine celebrities, like MTV reality-series star Kelly Osbourne, rocker Tommy Lee, and Kevin Federline, ex-husband of pop singer Britney Spears, were active on MySpace. Users' personal pages also began cropping up in tragic news stories, such as the MySpace profiles of two Pennsylvania teenagers who became fugitives after the 18-year-old man became the main suspect in the slaying of his 14-year-old girlfriend's parents in November of 2005.

Anderson remains the No. 1 "friend" on MySpace, and despite e-mail filters still fields about 2,000 messages daily. DeWolfe, married to a former record company executive, became a father in 2006. Each became overnight millionaires when Murdoch's company bought Intermix Media—though not because of any financial stake in MySpace. They were merely its creators, and their former boss at Intermix, Greenspan—who had been ousted from the company shortly after MySpace took off—claimed that both Anderson and DeWolfe had opposed the News Corporation deal, but ultimately had little say in the matter. Reportedly Murdoch offered Anderson and DeWolfe "multimillion-dollar bonus payments," reported Saul Hansell in the New York Times, "to smooth the feelings that were ruffled when Intermix was sold, dragging MySpace along with it against the will of its founders, who received only a small portion of the sale price." Verini, in the Vanity Fair article, cited an anonymous source who estimated both received $15 million in the deal, but noted that Greenspan's successor had netted $23 million that same day.

The acquisition meant some changes for Anderson and DeWolfe, who retained their respective posts as president and chief executive officer at MySpace, with contracts set to expire in October of 2007. They did relocate their headquarters from Santa Monica to new Fox Interactive Media offices to Beverly Hills, and there were some adjustments to be made in the new corporate environment. "Before, I could do whatever I wanted," Anderson told Sellers in Fortune. "Now it takes more time to get people to agree on things. All the budget reviews and processes. That can be a pain. But it's not stopping us." The News Corporation deal allowed Anderson and DeWolfe to expand the MySpace universe even further. A satellite-radio channel and a wireless technology deal that would let users access MySpace pages from mobile phones was in the works, and the duo also launched a record label project with Interscope Records. A film division was also imminent, aimed at finding and supporting some of the more creative members of the MySpace community. "This generation wants to be known, they want to be famous," DeWolfe told Verini in the Vanity Fair article. "MySpace facilitates that."

Sources

Periodicals

BusinessWeek, December 12, 2005, p. 86.

Fortune, September 4, 2006, p. 66.

Guardian (London, England), July 3, 2006, p. 5.

Newsday (Melville, NY), April 29, 2005.

Newsweek, August 1, 2005, p. 44; December 26, 2005, p. 82.

New York Times, August 28, 2005; October 17, 2005; April 23, 2006; September 16, 2006.

Sunday Mirror (London, England), August 20, 2006, p. 24.

USA Today, February 13, 2006, p. 13B.

Vanity Fair, March 2006, p. 238.

Online

"MySpace: The Business of Spam 2.0," Valleywag.com, http://www.valleywag.com/tech/myspace/myspace-the-business-of-spam-20-exhaustive-edition-199924.php (October 29, 2006).