MySpace.com – The Many Failures Before Success

The next time your Internet marketing efforts are not producing the best results, take a deep breath and learn from your mistakes. Success does not come overnight. Look at MySpace.com, for instance:

Here is what it was doing in 1996:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961221174030/http://www.myspace.com/

And in 2000 the site was selling storage space (I wonder what happened to everyone’s files…):
http://web.archive.org/web/20010205220624/www.myspace.com/nd_home.asp

2001? Same business, different design:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010921105232/http://www.myspace.com/

By 2002 the guy who made MySpace.com THE MySpace it is today had purchased the domain. Guess what he was using it for… Got scooters?
http://web.archive.org/web/20021207090534/www.electricscooterdepot.com/
(The domain looks like a different URL because he was using a redirect)

Finally, in 2004 this domain that had been passed around like a bad cold began to take shape as an online community:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040519192432/http://www.myspace.com/

And by 2005… Look familiar?
http://web.archive.org/web/20050123151743/http://myspace.com/

So next time you start to feel discouraged, just think about the little domain that could, and how it went from a terrible looking site-for-sale, to a data storage disaster, to a peddler of electric scooters, to competing with Yahoo for the most page views out of any website in the universe.

If you thought this was a fun little exercise, you will enjoy tinkering around with the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” at: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php .