Fast-Growing myYearbook.com Gets $4.1 Million

Catherine Cook has what she calls "the best after-school job ever." Two major venture capital firms think so too, because they just approved $4.1 million in funding for myYearbook.com, the social-networking site Catherine created with her brother, Dave, over spring break in 2005.

The New Jersey high school senior and her brother started the web site as a way for kids at their school to get to know each other better. Regular old yearbooks seemed dated and kind of useless to them. When the site launched in August 2005,  200 students from their school, Montgomery High School, signed on. In nine months, myYearbook.com grew far beyond Montgomery High when it hit the 1-million-member mark.

Today, MyYearbook.com has 1.7 million members, 150 million page views, and 5 million unique visitors. U.S. Venture Partners and First Round Capital are providing the $4.1 million in funding.

The Cooks have been so successful so quickly by trying to create a safe space for teens to get to know the kids they see in school, and their friends.

"We had seen how gross MySpace had gotten," Cook said as we chatted on the phone after school recently. "As soon as we launched, we made sure that you can't send messages to profiles that don't want you to. And we blocked people who don't know someone's email from contacting them."

They have also been vigilant of the images posted on the site. "We were deleting ones that showed the least bit of nudity or violence," she said.

At first, they did it without ads, but now are incorporating ads in separate profiles and packages. They continue to eschew the banner ads they don't like on MySpace; instead, if a movie advertises with the site, you can find trailers and information in a separate profile.

Cook says most of the funding influx will go to the continued expansion of the site, and adding an age-verification tool that no other social-networking site has. She assured me it works, but couldn't yet say how. I'll let you know when it's introduced on the site.

The Cooks moved myYearbook out of their Skillman, N.J., home and across the Delaware River to New Hope, Pa., where a staff of 20 programmers and member support employees work. Catherine's brother, Dave, is now a freshman at the University of Colorado, Boulder. And they continue to get help from myYearbook.com's CEO, their older brother Geoff, who has a proven win record in creating successful web sites. He founded and later sold the online writing and editing services, EssayEdge.com and ResumeEdge.com while still a Harvard undergraduate.

Stay tuned. I think we'll be hearing a lot more about this fast-growing social-networking site. Have you heard about it from your kids yet?