OurThoughts on MyYearBook

MyYearBook founders Dave, Catherine and Geoff were kind enough to speak to Doug and I late last week about their rapidly-growing social platform.  Alas, a recording glitch has made it impossible for us to share the audio recording of that conversation as we try to do.  MyYearBook is an exciting project, however, and its management team claims over 100,000 new registrations since launch a few months ago.  Here, I'd like to discuss some of the salient points that we covered.

Billed as "the ultimate yearbook -- connecting everyone to everyone like never before, and brimming with things you can't do anywhere else," MyYearBook seems designed to capitalize on a number of powerful trends in social software.  Not incidentally, their offering initially transplanted FaceBook's school-centric metaphor to the hallways of high schools everywhere.  It has rapidly expanded in scope, however.  Catherine, Geoff and Dave have clearly recognized the potencies, for example, of MySpace's broad target group as well as its diversity of interactive media features.  They seem to have similarly studied LiveJournal's integrated blogging.

Almost as surprising as MyYearBook's broad development efforts is its founding team's insistence that it will remain entirely free to users and free of ads.  Thus far they have kept their word.  As they made it clear when we spoke, it's important to distinguish between random/loosely-targeted banner ads and sponsored presences with relevant marketing messages.  They have already been approached by representatives of a record label, for example.  While they didn't tell us exactly which label it was, they told us that it was not Geffen Records (as discussed in a previous post, Geffen has already sponsored groups on MySpace and FaceBook).

A number of SN teams (Doostang and Meetro both spring to mind) have told Doug and I that they hope to focus first on establishing a strong user-base, and determine the best way to monetize their traffic later on.  I don't really understand this philosophy -- it seems eerily reminiscent of biz-plans long gone bust to me.  If there's a mitigating factor here, perhaps it is the direct importance of network effects to the success or failure of a social platform.

In that vein, Geoff, Dave and Catherine's perspectives on user adoption, retention and traffic were most exciting to me.  Geoff said that today, for example, MyYearBook attracts about 150,000 daily page views.  Soon he expects to raise that number to 2.5 million daily page views by acquiring the profiles of another prominent social network.  While he couldn't say much else about that deal, including the name of its target, he mentioned that the logistics of integrating the new profile database promise to be anything but intuitive.  You can bet we'll check back on this once the deal is publicly announced, perhaps dwelling at that future date on the new users' demographics and discussing how much MyYearBook is likely to have paid for their profiles.  In the meantime, it seems clear that this team has a deep understanding of the fundamental importance that sustained, steadily growing traffic holds for the success of a social platform.  It seems to me that a number of revenue models are at least mostly compatible with MyYearBook's free and ad-free credo, and this team has the ingredients to drive any of them successfully.

I like this site a lot, and think it exhibits a number of powerful developments, both technological and strategic.  Hopefully Dave, Catherine and Geoff will check back with Doug and I in a few months and let us know how things are going, and hopefully the powers that be will look more favorably upon that podcast recording.  In the meantime, MyYearBook is live now -- you can check it out at http://www.MyYearBook.com.

Comments

[Jesse Hattabaugh]

I was introduced to MyYearbook by a MySpace friend. After checking out the site I just have to say; yawn. Is there anything about MyYearbook that is different from MySpace, Friendster, or TheFacebook? Aside from the pretty marketing gloss that's been so liberally applied. It seems to me that these people have seen the success of actually innovative sites like Friendster and The Facebook, and have decided to try to cash in on the idea. They bring nothing new to the table aside from an apparent desire to take over and profit from the success of current social networks.

Their most ludicrous statement in my opinion was that they want it to be "something that will be around billions of years from now". Yeah, right, that'll happen. Apparently these kids having't been on the internet very long. If they had been they would know that the attention spans of internet denizens are quite short, especially the young crowd that they hope to attract. They seem to have a very common high school perspective that the things and people that are important to them now, like "flirting" and "knocking books down" will be important to them and their users forever.

So friendster gets boring, myspace is creepy, and classmates is a rip off. While I can't disagree about any of that, I can't see how they plan to fix it either. Sure they're free unlike classmates, but that's not who they are copying anyway. I'm not saying that there isn't room for improvement, it's just that I don't see any of that in this site.

[Doug Sherrets]

Well said, Jesse. You are on the mark with your comments.

[Jake]

MyYearbook is a social networking site mascarading as an online yearbook. My company offers web AND physical yearbooks combined - you use an online system to create paperback and hardback books - www.allyearbooks.co.uk. Whilst there's certainly a market for online-only offerings, many people will want the physical books too.

Perhaps in the future my site will become more social-networking oriented, but for now the focus is on getting real yearbooks out the door, which is what the market is asking for.

[Lissie McCartney]

Well, I must say I disagree. I can't stand Myspace-what an awful site. As far as I'm concerned, myYearbook is awesome! (I also find less perverts on there.) It's easier to use, and user-friendly. I love it!