It looks like Myspace’s creepy tactic might have actually worked, after all. Last summer the former social networking giant started randomly emailing past users old photos of themselves as a ploy to make them remember back when Myspace was still a pretty cool place. And it worked! Sort of. According to the Wall Street Journal, MySpace reached 50.6 million unique users in November of 2014, which is a 575% increase from November of 2013.
However the reason for people suddenly flocking back to Myspace (other than to solict sex) is to retrieve old photos for “Throwback Thursday,” to be posted on superior social networking sites.
Besides a young following, MySpace also sees lots of return visitors from MySpace’s mid-2000s heyday–particularly on Thursdays. That’s because many people have old digital photos stored on the site, which they may want to retrieve for “Throwback Thursday” –a popular social media ritual in which people post retro photos on social media.
“MySpace was an early photo-sharing platform,” said [Tim] Vanderhook [chief executive of Viant Inc., Specific Media’s parent company]. “So we still see a lot of people coming back to access old photos. They may not visit every day but they come back once a week or once a month.”
As enticing as it may be to have access of old photos of yourself wearing track suits and Uggs, it should be noted that Viant has plans to mine that Myspace user data for a “cross-channel marketing initiative” to connect it with advertising data. Basically, it’s what Facebook is already doing, but if anyone still finds it a little too intrusive then maybe it’s best to let the past stay in the past and finally delete that old Myspace account.