What Happened to myYearbook: The Complete Timeline

myYearbook never shut down, which is why nobody can find the obituary. It was renamed. The site two New Jersey teenagers launched in April 2005 became MeetMe in the summer of 2012, and the mechanics that made it feel alive, a chronological stream of strangers and games as icebreakers, went out of fashion rather than out of business.

What happened to myYearbook

myYearbook was renamed, not shut down. The social network launched in April 2005, was acquired by Quepasa Corporation in a merger that closed on November 10, 2011, and was rebranded as MeetMe in mid-2012. The users, the staff, the code and the company all continued under the new name; only the myYearbook brand was retired. That is the whole answer, and it explains why searches for a shutdown date come back empty. There was never a shutdown, only a rename that took about a year to work through the corporate paperwork and then the website itself.

2005: two teenagers, a yearbook, and a $250,000 check

Catherine Cook and her brother Dave Cook came up with myYearbook over spring break in 2005, while both were students at Montgomery High School in Skillman, New Jersey. Their complaint was concrete: the printed yearbook was a bad tool for meeting anyone you did not already know. Their older brother Geoff Cook, who had built the writing-services businesses EssayEdge and ResumeEdge, funded the site with a widely reported $250,000 and later ran it as chief executive. The first version went live in April 2005. Catherine was 15 and a sophomore; Dave was 16 and a junior. ABC News reported Catherine at 15 and Dave at 16; other profiles place Dave a year older, as a high school junior.

The era myYearbook belonged to

The mid-2000s were the only moment when a social network built by two high schoolers could plausibly reach tens of millions of people. The Pew Research Center reported on January 7, 2007, from a survey fielded October 23 to November 19, 2006, that 55 percent of online American teenagers used social networking sites, and that the same share had created a personal profile online. Hitwise measured MySpace as the single most-visited website in the United States for the week ending July 8, 2006, at 4.5 percent of all US internet visits. In that window several networks could each be somebody's entire internet, and myYearbook was one of them.

2006 to 2010: funding, Chatter, and a billion page views

Outside capital arrived quickly for myYearbook: $4.1 million in 2006 from U.S. Venture Partners and First Round Capital, followed by a $13 million round in 2008. The product that defined the site came later. Chatter launched in November 2009 as a live stream of posts from people you had never met, filterable by simple demographics. TechCrunch reported in April 2010 that Chatter was generating one million updates a day, and that monthly page views had climbed from 544 million in November 2009 to 998 million in March 2010. The company, run from New Hope, Pennsylvania, posted $23.7 million in revenue for 2010, up 53 percent year over year.

What myYearbook actually felt like to use

• Lunch Money. The site ran on a virtual currency called Lunch Money, earned by signing up, logging in, inviting friends and winning contests, or bought outright with a card. Lunch Money could be bought outright, which made virtual goods a real revenue line alongside advertising.
• Battles. Two members went head to head with a Lunch Money wager, each posting a photo or a video. It was a competition format whose real function was giving two people who had never spoken a reason to be aware of each other.
• Ask Me and Rate Me. Ask Me was an open question box in the style of Formspring; Rate Me put your photo in front of people who did not know you. Both were low-stakes ways to get a first response out of a stranger without composing a message.
• Chatter as the front door. Unlike a friends-only feed, Chatter was explicitly built for people you had not met, with the games running inside the stream itself. The feed was the icebreaker rather than the archive.

July 20, 2011: the $100 million headline

Quepasa Corporation announced on July 20, 2011 that it would acquire Insider Guides, Inc., the corporate entity behind myYearbook.com, under a merger agreement dated July 19, 2011. TechCrunch and Adweek both reported the value at $100 million, split as approximately $82 million in Quepasa common stock and approximately $18 million in cash. myYearbook brought 32.7 million registered users to the deal, along with $23.7 million of 2010 revenue and positive EBITDA, which is why a smaller public company could credibly buy a bigger private one.

November 10, 2011: what the merger actually paid

The merger closed on November 10, 2011, and the closing terms are more precise than the headline. Quepasa paid $18 million in cash to myYearbook's security holders and issued them 17 million shares of Quepasa common stock. The widely quoted $100 million figure was a valuation of that stock at announcement rather than a fixed price: the cash half was locked, the equity half floated with Quepasa's share price across the four months in between. Both numbers are accurate and they describe different moments, which is the usual reason sources appear to disagree about what myYearbook sold for. The combined company reported roughly 70 million registered users, and Geoff Cook became chief operating officer and a director.

2012: how myYearbook became MeetMe

Quepasa announced the rebrand on April 3, 2012: the corporate name, myYearbook.com and the Spanish and Portuguese language properties would all become MeetMe, and the stock ticker would change from QPSA to MEET. The stated plan put the myYearbook site's switch in July 2012, and it happened earlier than that. A TechCrunch piece published July 1, 2012 and co-written by Catherine Cook with Geoff Cook among others describes the change as having taken place almost a month before, and the corporate rename is generally dated to June 2012. Members who complained within seven days were given $2.99 worth of virtual currency and a note thanking them for the feedback.

Where the company went after the name change

MeetMe kept consolidating after 2012. It bought Skout for $55 million in October 2016, acquired if(we) in April 2017 and renamed itself The Meet Group, and in March 2020 agreed to be taken private at $6.30 per fully diluted share, an enterprise value of roughly $500 million. The through-line is that the asset two teenagers started in 2005 kept trading upward for fifteen years while the brand people actually remember was retired within seven. If you are looking for what took the place of that kind of software in daily life, the honest answer is a set of narrower single-purpose apps, which is the argument our roundup of Nextdoor alternatives makes at the neighborhood level.

Why that generation of social software felt different

• The feed was chronological. Posts appeared in the order they were made, so being early and being interesting were different things. Nothing got reordered to keep you scrolling, because there was no ranking model doing the reordering.
• Bulletins broadcast to your whole friend list. A bulletin on MySpace went to everyone you were connected to at once: one message, the whole list, no system deciding who deserved to see it. The physical version of the same idea, the community bulletin board, worked on exactly that logic.
• The profile was yours to build. Layout, song, top friends, the whole self-presentation was a document you controlled rather than a template you filled in. Identity was a craft project instead of a form submission.
• Meeting beat maintaining. Chatter existed to introduce strangers, while most of what came after optimized for maintaining ties you already had. Same shape, different product, and it is a large part of why moving to a new city feels harder now than it did in 2008.

The mechanics worth bringing back

Nostalgia for myYearbook is not really nostalgia for a website, it is nostalgia for a set of mechanics that made meeting somebody new feel low-stakes, and that's what we're building MetroMeet for: a throwback social app scoped to your actual area, with a wall for your street, real verified profiles, and games you can play with people nearby. Adults-only (18+), zero rage-bait by design, and it works at any postal code where it ships, your feed scoped by the distance you set, not by city lines. Bulletins are in the build, because a post that goes to your entire friend list at once is still one of the most useful things social software ever shipped.

Published August 25, 2026 · MetroMeet