MySpace Didn't Die, It Sold Its Soul (And ChatGPT Might Be Next) The War on Mediocre Business Ep. 1

In this episode of Whatever Happened To, I break down how MySpace went from the most visited site on the internet to a $35 million fire sale, in five years. The short answer: they stopped doing what made them great and started chasing ad revenue instead.

I'm Scott Monday. I run two businesses in California's Central Valley and I'm morbidly curious about what makes businesses succeed and fail, especially the ones we all grew up with.

0:00 — MySpace had more traffic than Google
0:23 — What this series is about
0:39 — My personal connection to MySpace
1:19 — How MySpace was built (2003 to 2004)
2:17 — 25 million users and Rupert Murdoch's $580M buyout
3:02 — News Corp sees "eyeball inventory"
3:26 — The $900M Google ad deal
3:46 — Why it was a trap
4:25 — Facebook rises while MySpace falls
5:52 — The core lesson: optimized for the contract, not the customer
6:11 — Is ChatGPT making the same mistake?
7:50 — What this means for your business
9:25 — The question every business owner needs to ask
10:05 — Subscribe and final thought

The lesson isn't just about MySpace. It's about the small decisions you and I make every day that slowly erode the thing our customers love. MySpace wasn't run by idiots. They were run by smart people who made a series of bad decisions, each one looking reasonable in isolation.

Don't make the same trade.

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