myYearbook

» see myyearbook.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

myyearbook sat in the part of the american internet i can read about now but cannot personally remember. 2005 was my last year as an undergrad. teen social networks in the us were not on my radar. msn messenger was the chat layer of my life, and the social-network shape of turkish 2005 was hi5, which i did not use either. myyearbook is a grave i write from research, not memory.

the site was founded in april 2005 by catherine and dave cook, who were sophomore and junior at montgomery high school in skillman, new jersey. they convinced their older brother geoff, who had already built and sold a college essay editing site from harvard, to put up 250000 dollars in seed money. the original idea was simple: a digital yearbook for their high school. it spread to other schools fast.

by the late 2000s myyearbook was a top tier american teen social network. tens of millions of registered users, real revenue from virtual currency called lunch money. in 2011 the latino social network quepasa acquired it for 100 million dollars in a stock-and-cash deal. in june 2012 the merged company retired both names and relaunched as meetme. that is the date the myyearbook brand died.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what got buried with it ~

lunch money was the in-app currency, and you spent it on flirts, gifts and profile items. it was the kind of soft virtual economy that habbo had already invented and that farmville would push to a hundred million users a few months later. for high schoolers without paypal or a credit card, lunch money felt like real money, especially the kind you could earn by doing tasks instead of spending dollars.

"match" was the other piece. myyearbook had a flirt-and-match flow before the standalone dating apps that came after grindr and tinder. it was branded as casual not romantic, but the mechanics looked the same. when meetme rebranded out of myyearbook in 2012 it kept the matching surface and dropped the yearbook framing, and that is the product shape that survives to this day.

~ what it became ~

meetme grew from the myyearbook foundation into a publicly-listed location-based dating-adjacent app. in 2017 the meet group acquired skout, lovoo and tagged. in 2020 prosus's myloop subsidiary acquired the meet group for 500 million dollars. the corporate body that started as a high school yearbook in skillman, new jersey is now a sub-product of a south african media holding.

the cook siblings cashed out clean. catherine, who started the site at 15, was a wired magazine cover and a vogue feature before she finished college. she wrote a business book at 20. dave and geoff stayed on through the meetme transition. founding a social network and selling it for nine figures while in high school is a story that sounded plausible only in the late 2000s american startup decade. myyearbook was the proof.

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