MyYearBook Gunning For Facebook Market

January 25th, 2007 at 6:00 pm

MyYearBook - Heard of ‘em long time ago. “Made by two highschool students”…well, some think that it’s actually the older brother’s idea and he’s just using his sibling as a marketing ploy…which if true, is pretty slick.

I think I’ll stick with Facebook and MySpace (neither confirming or denying that I have an account lol)

January 25th, 2007 at 6:16 pm

I’m really surprised that there’s still room in the market for another major player alongside Facebook and MySpace. Especially considering the chicken and egg problem that’s so critical for social networks.

I’m pretty surprised they bagged 4.1 million, kudos to them!

January 25th, 2007 at 6:43 pm

of which chicken and egg problem do you speak? you might as well assume the web is AOL or Prodigy’s proprietary app if you mean what i think you do - theres no reason social networks can’t span sites. this is the web afterall, not ‘highway-connected-silos’. LiveJournal and Tribe already offers their user data as FOAF

January 25th, 2007 at 8:11 pm

hmmm, their alexa chart is nosediving… for a site with that level of traffic i think one can assume that alexa is at least somewhat accurate.

also, the huge jump late 05 and subsequent slide doesnt suggest “organic growth” as the founder is claiming. i wonder what their real numbers look like.

January 25th, 2007 at 9:52 pm

Yeah the numbers on these things are often suspect and you hear different “rumors” all the time. I suppose that if they’ve been around this long and are now taking $4.1 million from somebody other than rich older brother, they’re not making huge amounts of money. It appears that they run an affiliate program that pays $1 for every user that you get to sign up, so not every user is coming organically or free, and these types of affiliate programs where you can get paid for free signups are often a great attraction for fraudsters, so who knows how many registrations are legitimate, active users.

Doesn’t look a great investment when you compare it to sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc.:

http://www.alexaholic.com/myye.....m+bebo.com

Obviously Alexa isn’t perfect but I definitely think this is probably one of those sites that’s more hype than substance and offers a lot less value to a media company as an acquisition than quite a few other social networks that could be on the market.

January 25th, 2007 at 10:45 pm

O: Of course it’s good they got funding. Now they’ll be able to afford continued advertising on your sites.

Whatever happened to the good old days of social networking when these things (allegedly) grew with $0 spent on marketing? One of the key points people often make is that Web 2.0 companies, unlike their Web 1.0 counterparts, have little to no marketing expenditures and grow virally. MyYearBook is buying advertising, paying affiliates for generating signups, etc. Seems like their marketing strategy is more Web 1.0 than Web 2.0. Maybe it can work, but given the fairly ineffective monetization most of these sites have been able to achieve, there’s a real risk that if the cost of user acquisition is much greater than $0 you might lose money fairly easily. We know MySpace has monetized fairly well, and Facebook to some extent too, but those are first-tier social networks and all the data indicates that MyYearBook is not in the same class.

January 26th, 2007 at 4:16 am

Capital used judiciously can grow dramatically, hope more entrepreneurship results in more economic growth of US.

Cool Info.

http://blogs.ibibo.com/TechnicalJournal

January 26th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

“myYearbook is free to register. For every registrant you refer, we will pay you $1.00. Because the site is free, and easy to sign up, we convert 30 - 75% of the clicks that come to the site. To get started making money, join the affiliate program here.”

http://www.myyearbook.com/?mys.....VycmVyPTA=

Wonder how much they paid out to date?

February 14th, 2007 at 2:18 pm

http://gigaom.com/2006/03/04/d.....r-goliath/
had an interesting position on myyearbook.com, but more interesting were some of the replies. copied one below. it’s kinda outdated (and a little angry) but does have some relevant history.

Jason L. Baptiste11 on March 5th, 2006 at 12:35 PM - Permalink
Look, this myyearbook boondoggle is getting out of hand.

These kids did not launch a succesful social network by any means. The site simply took over another domain name that had a lot of traffic already by doing dating/”what kind of person am I” tests.

If you look at the wikipedia entry, you can see that it “merged” with zenhex.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyYearbook.com

If you look at the traffic, you can see that the switchover from zenhex to myyearbook did not dramatically increase traffic. And given that there a lot more pages to look at on myyearbook than zenhex, if the number of users stayed consistent, traffic should have gone up more than this.

Anyone that has anything to say about myyearbook should really look at this graph first:

http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....ex.com#top

When you take into account all of the mainstream press myyearbook has gotten, it is clear that the real traffic growth from real users has been a dramatic failure. Look at all of the people linking to them. Where is the real usage on there?

So let’s see, they switched a succesful site to a crappy social network and their real traffic went down. And people are suggesting they can take down MySpace and Facebook. Ha.

I think this is a perfect example of reporters/pundits that are too old to “get it” knowing that they don’t “get it” and just buying into the hype without digging too deep. Could a wireless networking startup get away with this kind of crap?

So the moral of the story is: build a succesful site doing something simple that people will like, such as free dating tests. Them find a hot/flavor of the month space to get into, and switch the domain name to point from the original site to the new one. Your alexa for the new site will go through the roof and you will hoodwink a lot of people that should know better.

March 9th, 2007 at 7:28 pm

john must work for facebook. what are you talking about…info sold to porn sites? that’s bull…do you think a top venture firm like USVP would invest $4m in a site doing something sketchy like that?…I’ve been a member of myyearbook for a while and it’s a great site with a lot of great features. I think some of the people making negative comments on this forum have an ax to grind or work for a competing site.