Myspace Is Embarrassing Users With Old Photos to Win Them Back
Myspace wants you back — even if it requires a little blackmail — The social network is emailing users old photos of themselves in hopes of enticing them to return to Myspace. The emails include one or two old photos …
Context & Ripple Effects
Myspace's comeback has been a decade-long series of resets: a youthful reincarnation pitched in early 2010, a News Corp. reboot that same October aimed at recapturing young users via an entertainment-first redesign (including a Mashup integration with Facebook), then a January 2011 cut of roughly half its staff and, by that June, even its co-founders admitting they had stopped logging in themselves. Each reset tried to win users forward with new products.
The June 2014 tactic inverts that logic. Instead of offering something new, Myspace is emailing lapsed accounts one or two old photos of themselves — spending from its archive rather than its product roadmap. The pickup across Neowin, Consumerist, ABC News, hypebot and InvestorPlace within a day shows the campaign landed less as marketing than as a story about what a fading social network will do with the personal media it still holds.
First-order effects
- Lapsed Myspace users get emails surfacing their own years-old photos, making the site's stored personal media — not any new feature — the pitch for returning.
- The campaign trades on emotional leverage that only Myspace holds: unlike a paid acquisition push, the asset being deployed costs nothing because users uploaded it themselves.
Second-order effects
- Rivals facing their own churn — and any aging consumer web service with a dormant-user base — face pressure to answer with equivalent archive-mining win-back programs, normalizing the practice of emailing people their own past content as a growth tactic.
- Given Myspace's confirmed 2010 episode of apps transmitting user data to brokers, a campaign built on repurposing stored personal photos hands critics and privacy watchers a ready-made line of attack about consent for secondary uses.
Third-order effects
- If archive-based win-backs prove out, the durable value of a declining social platform shifts from its active graph to its dormant content library — raising the question, unresolved in 2014, of whether users retain any practical claim over media they no longer log in to manage.
- Regulators and platform-design norms would eventually have to decide where 'reminding you of your own photos' ends and unsolicited use of personal archives begins, a boundary no major social network had yet been forced to draw.
The trend: As network effects flip against a legacy social platform, its last scalable asset becomes the dormant user-generated archive itself, mined for re-engagement before it can be monetized or lost.