When Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp sold MySpace for $35 million last year, people were writing off the company as the one-time social media giant had befallen to Facebook and was on a quick slide into Friendster-dom. But today MySpace will reportedly boast about its one million new users. The site still has nowhere near the amount of visitors it had at its peak in 2008 (79.5 million), but it’s a start. The new owners, one of which is triple-threat heartthrob, Justin Timberlake, attribute the success to a shifted focus for the site. Instead of trying to compete with Facebook for “friends,” MySpace decided to place itself as an entertainment and music hub. And if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. At least that’s the sentiment Chris Vanderhook, one of the company’s owners, as the New York Times reports: “The new focus, Mr. Vanderhook said, was not to compete with Facebook as a social network, but to be the conduit for music and other forms of entertainment that can be shared through other networks.”
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