MyYearbook awaits its season

Catherine Cook and her brother, Dave, were flipping through a yearbook during spring break 2005 and wondering why it couldn't be online to give students more, like their favorite music and movies, and let them post comments and keep in touch.

The teens mentioned the idea to older brother Geoff, a self-made millionaire who founded and sold an online essay and resume-editing business he started in his dorm at Harvard University. Geoff thought it seemed like a "great opportunity" and put up $250,000.

Today, not quite two years later, myYearbook.com in the suburbs of Philadelphia has muscled into the online social-networking scene, although still a small player compared with MySpace.com, Facebook.com and YouTube Inc.

Geared specifically to high school students, myYearbook has 16 employees and offices in New Hope and counts more than 1.8 million members and 5 million visitors a month to its Web site.

Run by Catherine Cook, 17, a high school senior in Skillman, N.J.; Dave Cook, 18, a freshman at the University of Colorado; and Geoff Cook, 28, who is CEO, myYearbook.com recently raised $4.1 million from two venture-capital firms.

"It's a teen-centric site that's gained a lot of popularity in a short period of time," said Rick Lewis of U.S. Venture Partners, of Menlo Park, Calif., who led the financing with First Round Capital, of Conshohocken.

"Teens are the toughest demographic for advertisers to reach. Big-brand advertisers and the media conglomerates are all looking for innovative ways to reach a teen audience," Lewis said. "This is one place that they can go to find that audience."

Catherine Cook said she scribbled "myYearbook" on a notebook and put smiley faces in the 'Os.' That became the logo.

After hiring programmers in India to build the Web site, and using servers in Secaucus, N.J., myYearbook.com was launched in April 2005 - initially only to students at Montgomery High School in Skillman, Somerset County, where Catherine and Dave Cook were students.

Six months later, the site went global.

To spur student interest, Catherine wore a different myYearbook T-shirt every day to school for several weeks with sayings like, 'Are you the prettiest girl in the high school? Help the dumbest find out.'

"In the first week, we got 200 members to sign on," she said. "It kind of exploded immediately."

The free Web site gives every student an online "yearbook" and "locker." Students digitally sign each others' yearbooks, vote for classmates for superlatives like "best eyes" or "most likely to . . ." and "cutest couple," and share music, photos and video. Students who sign up are automatically linked to others at their school.

The site connects students through school club and sports pages. It also enables students to Flirt, Battle and Secretly Admire one another at the click of a mouse. "We take social games to a new level," Geoff Cook said.

Users also can share homework assignments and study guides just with people in their class.

"There's flirting on the site because people in my school wanted a better way to break the ice with people - to send a message, like giving a person a high five - to get to know them better," said Catherine Cook, who answers more than 1,000 e-mail messages a day.

"A lot of the ideas for features on the site come straight from the users," she said.

MyYearbook says it differs from other social-networking sites because it is targeted only to teens. "We're really nothing like MySpace," Geoff Cook said. "For one thing, 52 percent of their users are over 35." Facebook, another online social network, is geared more to college students, he said.

In contrast, 80 percent of myYearbook members are in high school, according to Catherine Cook, who added: "Teens don't want banner ads on their profiles."

But advertising is how the company generates revenue, with annual sales in the "low seven figures," and MyYearbook has been incorporating interactive ads where users view video, leave comments, and interact with the message.

Recently, to promote the movie Freedom Writers about violence, intolerance and disadvantaged high school students, Paramount Pictures Corp. provided movie video and MyYearbook created an interactive feature through which people could "stand on the line" against intolerance and sign their name. They also could post comments sharing their dream as related to the movie.

"We got 31,000 people to stand on the line against intolerance in less than two weeks," said Catherine, who goes to the office every day after school to work on the site.

"I get a lot of ideas from users. They know I'm 17 and a high school student like them and that I created the site. When they log on, they get an automated message from me and they can reply to that. When I go to college, that will continue."

An A student with a 4.0 grade-point average who takes five AP courses, Catherine Cook said she had been accepted at Georgetown University, and is waiting to hear from several other colleges in April. Wherever she goes, she said, she will work on the site from her dorm room.

Dave Cook, who is 1,800 miles away in Boulder, Colo., works on the Web site every day, his siblings said. He checks his messages, keeps his profile updated, and adds input to the business.

Geoff Cook, who often is still working late at night, takes a "minimal salary" and said "the point is to build a business that can last long-term. We are enjoying what we are doing. An IPO or being acquired is further down the road than we are thinking."

Part of the venture money raised will be spent on an ad sales team and infrastructure, "making sure we can keep pace with the amount of traffic we get and that we never hit the wall where our servers don't work and pages don't load. It has everything to do with the towers we have in New Jersey," he said.

Geoff Cook made a lot of money from the 2002 sale of EssayEdge. com and ResumeEdge.com, the Internet businesses he launched at Harvard. By the time he sold it to the Thomson Corp., he said, "we were doing about $6 million a year in sales."

Chris Fralic at First Round Capital, early-stage venture investors in Conshohocken, said: "We very much like Geoff and his track record. He built a great company out of his dorm room and is well on his way with myYearbook."

"They identified and resonated with a unique target in the teen high school crowd," Fralic said. "They are trying to give the kids all the things they like to do with each other around the high school experience."

Meanwhile, dozens of other so-called Web 2.0 companies - a term used to describe these post-Internet bubble ventures - are creating online communities.

Venture capitalists are eager to find the next YouTube, which was bought by Google Inc. last year for $1.76 billion. They have invested $951 million in 147 Internet "content" companies in 2006, up from $419 million in 75 companies in 2005, according to research by Thomson Financial.

"Venture capitalists are placing a lot of bets in this space," said Emily Mendell, vice president of strategic affairs and public outreach for the National Venture Capital Association. "They are not all going to succeed."

"But there's probably room for more social-networking sites than the average technology company because there are so many different niches," Mendell said. "You can have different networking sites with different demographics. Everyone is kind of watching and waiting to see where the eyeballs are going to go."