MySpace – what went wrong: ‘The site was a massive spaghetti-ball mess’

By 2009, MySpace was still the biggest website in terms of traffic, but Facebook was growing fast by this point, and according to Percival the atmosphere was defeatist when he joined the company.

The result? “As opposed to preserving and letting it run as it is, it just got really, really corporate. Politics, greed, all the horrible things that come with big corporations, slowly sort-of crept in,” said Percival.

Could MySpace have been saved? Percival talked about what the company might have done differently, and admitted that by the time he arrived in 2009, it was possibly unsaveable – not least because by that time, it was difficult to hire the most talented engineers against competition from Facebook, Google and other rising tech companies.