MySpace Hopes Nostalgia Could Fuel a Comeback. But It Got Burned In Its Last Relaunch.

In a new documentary, the current owners of MySpace say they are planning yet another comeback for the once-dominant social media website.

CNBC detailed that owners Tim and Chris Vanderhook, don't lay out a specific timeline for a relaunch. And they acknowledge that the last relaunch in 2013 didn't turn out well, with losses estimated at $150 million.

"We still own Myspace. We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace. We're just waiting for the right time to do it. And if that one doesn't work, we'll do it again," the pair said in the documentary, according to the outlet.

The current state of MySpace is dire. A visit to the website produced slow load times. The design is rows of pictures of musical artists with the word "News" in the bottom left corner. Sometimes when users click on one of the pictures, nothing seems to happen.

The sign-up page tells visitors to "Sign in with your Facebook account to find friends who are already on MySpace!."

But, according to CNBC, a new beginning for the site might be right around the corner as people could be nostalgic for a largely defunct social media brand that launched in 2003.

"Excitement about Myspace's relaunch reflects nostalgia for a more analog time, when algorithms were less dominant in our lives," Kate Winick, a principal analyst at Forrester, told CNBC. "We're seeing this in recent moves by both brands and users towards smaller, more private social experiences that feel less built for the algorithm and more personal to the individual user, like the explosion of growth on Substack and private communities on Discord."

However, despite assertions that major social media companies are seeing people opt out, indicating a desire that users want something different, a Pew Research Center study did not find this to be the case.

The center reported that adults in the U.S. using TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp and Reddit had grown in recent years. TikTok enjoyed relatively robust growth with 37 percent of adults saying they used it in 2025 compared to 21 percent four years earlier. Meanwhile, social media stalwarts, YouTube and Facebook, remained at the top in terms of usage with relatively stable user numbers.

Enders Senior Research Analyst Jamie MacEwan told CNBC that "The question for Myspace isn't will it eat Facebook's lunch twenty years later, but can it relaunch as a small ads platform and still be profitable."