Social media has become such an important part of our lives that it's easy to think it has always been there. However, knowing that social media can't exist without the internet, some simple math should tell us social media can't be more than 30 years old (the internet started becoming mainstream in the early 1990s).
However, believe it or not, social media is even younger than that. In fact, it wasn't until the late 1990s that it really became popular however it took even longer, until around 2005, for it to become the social and cultural institution it is today.
There are a few reasons for this, but perhaps the most significant is the now universal nature of smartphones. We can access the internet from pretty much anywhere, which means social media is never more than a few clicks away, which wasn't the case until the iPhone hit the market back in 2007.
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Furthermore, it took some time for the tech companies to figure out why people wanted to use social media in the first place. This is why we see so many companies in the early years of social media get very popular quickly but then fail dramatically. For example, remember when MySpace was a thing? And how many of us had a Friendster profile? These sites were all the rage, but they quickly died out and are forgotten forever. However, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and the company, they finally found the right formula, and social media as we know it was born.
To give you an idea of just how turbulent social media history has been, take a look at the following graph depicting the number of social media users over the years:
Social media is clearly growing rapidly, and this kind of rapid growth is bound to produce lots of change as companies, and users, try to figure out what they want. This means that while social media has been growing constantly for the past twenty years, there have been many ups and downs.
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Social media is defined as any type of communication within a group. In this sense, social media has been around since the times of town criers and messenger pigeons.
However, it's not hard to see how the term social media as used today refers to a very different type of communication, and while most of us understand what social media is when we see it, there is still a lack of total consensus as to what it means.
Be traced back hundreds if not thousands of years, but today we understand social media as something that takes place online, which means we only need to go back a few decades to find the beginning of social media.
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May be under the impression that social media was created when Mark Zuckerberg and his friends got together on Harvard's campus to create TheFaceBook. While Facebook did play an important role in making social media popular, it was hardly the first site.
In fact, social media was officially born in 1997, but the roots of social media trace back even further to the early 1990s and the birth of the blogosphere. Blogs planted in people's heads the idea that you could log onto the internet and post whatever you wanted and receive feedback about it without having to go through a third party. It was truly revolutionary, and it opened the door for the social media revolution that was about to occur.
The history of social media is defined by change. An initial flurry of new sites emerged at the turn of the millennium, but by the end of the 2000s, Facebook emerged as the leader, a position it still holds today.
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Several new players have entered the scene in the past decade, yet only time will tell if they can continue their success or if they will fall like so many have before.
Although blogging gave birth to the concept that would eventually turn into social media, it wasn't until 1997 that we had a website that resembles what we now understand to be social media. This site, Six Degrees, allowed users to make their own personalized profiles but to communicate with other users, one needed to add another person's profile, which is an early example of Friending someone.
The name of this site comes from the Six Degrees (of Kevin Bacon) theory that states we are all related to one another within six degrees of separation (although there's evidence to suggest it might be less).
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The site became quite popular after its launch - it had 3.5 million users at its most popular - but by 1999, the handwriting was on the wall. The site was bought by Youthstream Media, and by 2001 it was shut down.
Six Degrees didn't last because of a problem common to all early social media sites: monetization. It was customary to offer these services for free, but this meant using ads to generate revenue, which often interfered with the experience.
However, people knew this kind of website was valuable, which is why Six Degrees was sold for around $120 million, though this number is quite small compared to the valuations that would come later on in social media history.
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In 2002, a few years after Six Degrees was bought out and sold, Friendster launched. It was similar to Six Degrees in those users needed to create a profile and add friends to their network to interact. However, it went further than Six Degrees in that it allowed people to share videos and photos and message other people on the network.
These exciting new features made Friendster incredibly popular at the time of launch. In fact, it had more than three million users after just a few months, and in 2008, it surpassed the 100 million user mark. Of course, we all know that Facebook currently has billions of users, but Friendster did considerably better than any other site before it.
Friendster also stood up better against the test of time than Six Degrees, although it would also fail in the end. It continued to be used until 2011, when it was converted into a social gaming platform, and all services were suspended in 2015. However, Friendster helped make social media more popular than ever, setting the stage for a revolution.
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Somewhat surprisingly, the next social media site to appear on the scene was LinkedIn. It first launched in December 2002 as a site focused on helping professionals build a network, which remains its purpose to this day.
The number of LinkedIn users has grown considerably over the years, with most of the growth occurring alongside other social media sites. More specifically, LinkedIn has experienced a 1, 262 percent increase in the number of users in the past ten years.
Those who don't mistakenly credit Facebook with being the original social media site usually think MySpace was first on the scene. And while it's true there were several sites already in operation by the time MySpace launched; it's also true that Myspace completely changed the game.
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It officially launched in 2002, a decidedly big year for social media, and by 2005 it had around 20 million unique visitors to the site every month. In that same year, Rupert Murdoch's company, NewsCorp, bought the sight for over $580 million.
Then, over the next few years, MySpace continued to gain in popularity, so much so that by 2008 it had just under 80 million unique monthly visitors and was valued at $12 billion. At that time, it was also the #1 most visited website in the world, according to Alexa traffic rankings; today, it is ranked in the 4, 000s.
Part of MySpace's success came from the interactive platform that made it incredibly easy to share photos, videos, and other files. It's also true that MySpace entered the fray at a time when the internet was more popular and widespread. Millennials were entering high school and college, which meant the world was finally ready for social media.
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However, as we know, based on the number of people currently using MySpace, the site's success would not last. A big part of this was because Myspace, beginning in 2004, had to compete with Facebook, rapidly becoming one of the most popular sites worldwide. This meant that by 2007, when it had 300 million users, MySpace was at its peak. It sold in 2011 for $35 million, and Time, Inc. later bought it in 2015. It still exists today and has a niche following, but it is a mere shadow of the giant it once was.
By 2004, social media had become quite popular. However, when Mark Zuckerberg and his friends, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollom, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes created TheFaceBook, social media quickly became integral to our lives.
Initially only available to those with an @harvard.edu email address, Facebook quickly expanded to the rest of the Ivy League and Stanford and MIT until opening its doors in 2006 to anyone over the age of 13.
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Once it did this, there was no stopping Facebook's growth. In 2008, it overtook MySpace as the most-visited site in the world, and it currently sites at
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