Quepasa

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

~ the obit ~

the first time i heard the name quepasa was in 2026, in the queue of regional social networks rip.so was working through. it never reached turkey. it never reached europe in any meaningful way. it was specifically targeted at us hispanic and bilingual english-spanish audiences, which is to say the people it spoke to were not the people whose graveyards i was personally watching.

it was founded in phoenix in 1997 by jeffrey peterson and michael silberman, originally incorporated as internet century inc, renamed quepasa.com inc in december 1998. the company ipo'd on nyse amex in 1999 with the rest of the dot-com cohort and then crashed with them. the portal-era quepasa was a content site, spanish-language news plus an english-spanish toggle, the usual late-90s portal architecture sitting on top.

after the crash the company was effectively dormant for several years. peterson revived it later as a social network rather than a portal, and the social-discovery pivot worked. by march 2011 quepasa was reporting 32 million users, which made it the largest hispanic-focused social platform in north america.

in july 2011 quepasa acquired myyearbook for $100 million. myyearbook was a teen-skewed social-discovery site that had been around since 2005, founded by the cook siblings in new jersey. the two sites had similar product shapes but different audiences. in april 2012 the combined company announced the rebrand to meetme. by 5 june 2012 they were trading on nyse as MEET, and the quepasa consumer site was wound down through the rest of 2012. the name does not appear anywhere in meetme today.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the original quepasa was a late-90s portal in the spanish-speaking-internet shape. spanish-language news headlines plus an english-spanish toggle. a search engine that was never going to beat the english-only crawlers but was differentiated enough to matter. the bilingual angle was the pitch.

the second-life quepasa, the social network, ran from about 2007 to 2012. profiles plus photo sharing, the standard mid-2000s feature set, with the hispanic-american angle as the targeting. it was never on the global cultural map the way myspace or facebook were. it did real numbers in its niche and the niche was big enough to ipo on.

~ how it ended ~

the myyearbook acquisition in july 2011 was the inflection. myyearbook brought in a younger user base and a social-discovery feature set, but the two brands ran in parallel for less than a year before the parent company picked a single name for both. picking meetme over quepasa was a clean choice for the english-speaking part of the user base and a confusing one for the hispanic part.

the rebrand was announced 3 april 2012 and the nyse ticker change happened on 5 june 2012. the quepasa.com domain was redirected through the meetme stack over the second half of the year. peterson left around the rebrand. fifteen years of one of the most-recognized us hispanic internet brands ended in a press release that mostly emphasized the english-language product going forward.

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