Digital Media Buzz > Diversifying Ad Base With Engagement: A conversation with myYearbook

Diversifying Ad Base With Engagement: A conversation with myYearbook

Originally established in 2005, myYearbook is a popular social networking site founded by siblings Catherine and David Cook. Thanks to a $250,000 investment by brother and budding entrepreneur Geoff Cook, the community went from being exclusive to Montgomery High School students in New Jersey to a global phenomenon with millions of worldwide users. Though viewed as a fun and hip community by many of its members, myYearbook also represents a highly successful business model and can be considered a pioneer in the social media atmosphere.

DMB’s Contel Bradford spoke with co-founder and product guru, Catherine Cook.

In your viewpoint, how did MyYearBook go from simply an idea to a thriving social networking community?
When my brother and I first got the idea and launched the site in just our high school, myYearbook looked nothing like it does now. However, once we signed up 300 of our classmates in the first week, we started collecting feedback about what our members liked and didn’t like about the site, and what they thought could make the site better. As they told us what they wanted, we incorporated their ideas into the site. To this day, we still do that — but on a much larger scale. We collect and organize all the feedback from our members and build the applications our members want. By listening to what our members want and making them those features, we have been able to turn myYearbook from simply an idea to a thriving social media site with millions of engaged members.

Almost everyone is trying their hand at online business these days. Unfortunately, this global market seems to yield more losers than winners. Did you expect myYearbook to become such a big hit? Were there any hardships along the way?
There were a lot of barriers to our entry in the market, like our age and other sites like Facebook that already had huge communities, but we knew myYearbook would be a hit because we wanted to take it beyond social networking into cutting edge social media applications as well. For instance, Facebook focuses on being a social utility and provides the platform for other applications to be made for, whereas myYearbook creates both the platform and the applications. We view ourselves as more similar to ABC Family, which provides the networking and the programming. Our job is to keep members logging in and engaged.

Social networking aside — how did you and your brothers come up with an advertising model that has proven to be so successful?
At myYearbook we wanted to go beyond banner ads and allow our members the opportunity to interact with the brand through games, contests, widgets, changing existing applications and virtual gifts. Our members become very engaged with the ads. However, advertising only comprises two-thirds of our revenue. Recently we have become phenomenally successful in monetizing our members using our virtual currency Lunch Money. Lunch Money is used in all of myYearbook’s applications and can be bought with real money. Six months ago, 0 percent of our revenue came from Lunch Money, now one-third of it does.

Do you have any advice for businesses looking to capitalize on the popularity of social networking with their own community site?
Honestly, I feel there is already a fairly saturated market in the social networking space, and the best option for other companies hoping to have their own community would be to partner with or acquire a social network. However, I do think there is still a lot to be done with building applications for media sites and that we are probably only in the first inning of Twitter and real-time search innovation.

What is your outlook on the future of social media and how it will impact online advertising methods?
Social media is here to stay and traditional media will need to depend on social media and social networks in order to get its content out. Social media will also affect online advertising in that there will be increasingly greater competition to find the best ways to engage members and keep them interested in the brand, beyond the banner.