At best people consider myYearbook an afterthought in the social networking world – they weren’t even included in our 2009 Social Network valuation model because of a lack of available traffic data.
And yet…the company has managed to achieve profitability, a goal some of its huge competitors are still struggling to reach. CEO Geoff Cook told me today that the company is generating over $1 million/month in revenue, and became profitable in Q1 2009 (they’ve been ebitda profitable since last year).
1/3 of that revenue comes from virtual gifts, a product that only first launched in late 2008. The remainder, about 2/3 of revenue, is from advertising.
The site, which is aimed at teenagers, was first launched in 2005 by Geoff Cook and his siblings, Catherine and David. It now attracts nearly 6 million monthly unique visitors (Comscore worldwide, July 2009) and just over 1 billion monthly page views. 20 million users have registered.
As you might expect, myYearbook users overlap a lot with Facebook (60%) and MySpace (90%), so they have to be creative in offering something different to those users. As Cook explains in the video below, they are focusing on offering users a variety of games and activities to keep them engaged on the site, as well as facilitating the discovery of new people.
Cook also says that his team is focused more on monetization than growth at this point, and it’s important for them to build a sustainable business. They have no plans to raise more capital, he says. To date, they’ve raised just over $17 million.
Our video interview with Cook is below:
