goal was to promote a common set of standards for software developers to write programs for social networks. Google had been unsuccessful in building its own social networking site Orkut in the American market, and was using the alliance to present a counterweight to Facebook. By late 2007 and into 2008, MySpace was considered the leading social networking site, and consistently beat out its main competitor Facebook in traffic. Initially, the emergence of Facebook did little to diminish MySpace's popularity; at the time, Facebook was targeted only at college students. At its peak, when News Corporation attempted to merge it with Yahoo! in 2007, Myspace was valued at $12 billion. 2009–2016: Decline and sale by News Corporation On April 19, 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace in Alexa rankings. In May 2009, Facebook surpassed MySpace in the number of unique U.S. visitors. Since then, Myspace has seen a continuing loss of membership. There are several suggested explanations for its decline, including the fact that it stuck to a "portal strategy" of building an audience around entertainment and music, whereas Facebook and Twitter continually added new features to improve the social networking experience. A former MySpace executive suggested that the $900 million three-year advertisement deal with Google, while being a short-term cash windfall, was a handicap in the long run, as it required MySpace to place even more ads on its already heavily advertised space, which made the site slow, more difficult to use and less flexible. MySpace could not experiment with its own site without forfeiting revenue, while Facebook was rolling out a new, clean site design. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe reported that he had to push back against Fox Interactive Media's sales team, who monetized the site without regard to user experience. In 2012, Katz described how News Corporation had put significant pressure on MySpace to "focus on near-term monetization, as opposed to thinking about long-term product strategy," while Facebook focused user engagement over revenue. Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, noted of social networking websites that "companies might serially rise, fall, and disappear, as influential peers pull others in on the climb up—and signal to flee when it's time to get out." The volatility of social networks was exemplified in 2006, when Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal launched an investigation into children's exposure to pornography on MySpace. The resulting media frenzy and the site's lack of an effective