Your old MySpace email address is worth a ridiculous amount of money

If you're older than Generation Z, chances are at some point in the murky past you owned a MySpace account on which you posted embarrassing 00s selfies and listened to a lot of music before it was cool.

MySpace is currently owned by internet advertising company Specific Media, who bought it for just $35million - and it turns out that the acquisition was quite the bargain, thanks to all your old data.

MySpace still has more than 1billion registered users, and that huge data set equates to big bucks.

As Lara O'Reilly at Business Insider explains:

When it comes to online advertising, first-party data is considered the holy grail. It means you can confirm you are targeting the actual consumer you aim to be targeting, rather than making probabilistic bets based on cookies and browsing behaviour.

It's part of the reason why Facebook and Google dominate the online advertising space: they have the all-important registration data.

The "surprising renaissance" comes from MySpace's rebranding as primarily a destination for new music, spearheaded by Justin Timberlake back in 2011.

There's even evidence that today's teenagers, who were too young for MySpace the first time around, are signing up for brand new accounts.

Between December 2013 - December 2014 Myspace's US traffic grew by 469 per cent, Quartz reported - numbers that make it bigger than Vice, Snapchat and the New York Post's websites.

If you can remember your old password, now might be a good time to log in.

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