Teen Social Network myYearbook Gets $13 Million

Teen Social Network myYearbook Gets $13 Million

myYearbook, a social network for teenagers that launched in 2005, has raised $13 million in a Series B funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners, US Venture Partners, and First Round Capital. The new round brings the company’s total funding to $18.6 million.

myYearbook says it sees 10 million unique visitors monthly, and also makes the claim that it is the third largest social network in the US. (Not quite. It is only a fraction of the size of MySpace or Facebook, and Bebo and imeem also attract more monthly unique visitors. According to comScore, myYearbook had 4.5 million unique visitors in June, versus 5.2 million for Bebo and 6.4 million for imeem). When we last wrote about them, there was speculation that the site may have more high school users than Facebook. This is almost certainly no longer the case. Facebook has seen dramatic growth since that time, with 37.4 million uniques in June, with 10 percent of those between the ages of 12 and 17, says comScore. MyYearbook has a larger percentage of users in that age group (23.8 percent), but less than a third as many total.

Still, myYearbook continues to produce impressive stats if you look at Hitwise, with 384% in year-over-year growth.

Study: Women Outnumber Men on Most Social Networks

Online reputation company Rapleaf has released a new study of 49.3 million people, revealing gender and age data about social network users. On most of the main social networks - including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 - women outnumber men by a considerable amount. On Facebook, the 18-24 age group is largest, with 1,685,029 women in that age group compared to 977,753 men. In MySpace, the same age group dominates, with 7,091,214 women and 5,226,788 men.

The only social networks studied that didn't have more women than men in the 18-24 year old group were venerable old LinkedIn (where incidentally the 25-34 age group was tops) and a site called Perfspot.

Other highlights:

• Women ages 14-24 dominate activity on social networks and have more friends than men of the same ages.
• Men ages 35+ are more active and have more friends than women of the same ages.
• The average social network user has 2-25 friends.
• There are a disproportionately high number of 69 year olds across various social networks. (my guess is that it's the most popular 'fake age')

Rapleaf states that it "analyzed people who are on at least one social network and in which there exists age information on these individuals." The study was done 10 June '08 and approx 90% of the 49m respondents were from the US.