17-year-old Girls Internet Entrepreneurship Tips

Intermediary transaction SEO diagnosis Taobao guest Cloud host technology Hall

The 17-year-old Catherine Cook, who co-founded Myyearbook.com two years ago, now has a revenue of millions of dollars a year.

Internet companies have always been more than 20-year-old young people in the world, look at Microsoft, Yahoo and Google know.

But now the age seems to have an increasingly low tendency.

Catherine Cook, 17 years old, wanted to qualify for the graduation yearbook in his first year of high school and set up a partnership with myyearbook.com. Less than two years ago, Cook said, the station now relies on advertising for millions of of dollars a year, according to comscore, the station has more than 3 million visitors per month (the station in 2006 through the venture capital to get 4.1 million dollars.) )

It is also one of the favorite areas of online marketing, as users are mostly between the ages of 13 and 22, and almost all are authentic Americans.

Cook hopes to turn Myyearbook into the most popular teen online media company in the United States by next year (the site currently has a user-generated online magazine and a variety of topics to vote on, such as which seniors are the most handsome and so on), while on the one hand in the web business, She will also enter Georgetown University (Georgetown University) this fall to attend international business and marketing.

CNET reporter interviewed Cook himself about the future of truancy, fundraising and online publishing.

Q: How did you get the idea of Myyearbook at first?

Cook: My brother Dave and I just switched to a new school, so I didn't know the same grade friends, so I had to find the yearbook to get to know my class. David took a picture of a girl to show me, then we want to say, if you can choose their own photos, and even the internet to paste their own photos and write a paragraph, it should be very good. We hadn't even heard of Facebook before, so we started to think about the feasibility of the idea, and in a few days we were looking for Geoff.

Is Geoff your other brother?

Cook: Yes, Geoff $250,000 trillion (about 8 million NT dollars) to invest, he has this money is also relying on the university to create a website to earn, we will start the road of entrepreneurship, our web page is to find the Indian side of the program team to carry out. My brother had previously worked with Indian engineers, so we thought it would be a good idea.

Has the whole station been developed in India?

Cook: Yes, the original version, we divided into several stages, the first stage is from our school, is a beta, it has not yet appeared on the site of those popular function options, these popular features are later friends contribute to the idea, we are eating together to talk about these features, such as how to chat , secretly like who.

Are these popular features provided by your friends?

Cook: Not all of them, such as the most popular this battles function, then the site has a netizen suggested, we developed in February, traffic so far 500%, this function is a one-to-one photo duel. The most popular features are. "Who is the most photogenic" is currently the most popular category, we launched one months ago the film showdown, and now the music film is also very popular.

What do you think of your site if you compare myspace.com with Facebook?

Cook: We are different from them, we are third in the United States in terms of traffic, but we are behind MySpace and Facebook, but we are stronger than Bebo, Hi5 and tagged.

But if you compare MySpace with Facebook, Myyearbook has a lot of young people, 80% of users are 13-22 years old, and we have our profit base.

Another big difference is that in MySpace or Facebook, users point to the personal data and then choose to join the group, but in Myyearbook, only 10% of the traffic is looking at personal data, and other traffic comes from our popular features like battles, Mymag and Riddles.

My mag This feature is a user-generated magazine, why is it so popular with users?

Cook: Some people come here do not want to play or challenge the category, they will go to use my Mag, it will be popular is the Netizen contributed a lot of new articles, we also have a professional editor, otherwise the article will not be so wonderful.

Only about 2% articles are published and are closely related to teenagers, not just celebrity gossip, like how we talk about maintaining good relationships.

Many teen magazines, such as Teen arranges, Elle girl and so on, have even ceased to be physical magazines, but their online editions are not as popular as ours, as they maintain their original publishing media companies and are not accustomed to full Web publishing. I personally think that a lot of young people's magazines are focused on the star gossip, I feel very different, I personally hate to see this kind of thing.

The hottest article on my mag gets 3000 discussions a day, and the average of 1000 discussions a day.

From this perspective, what do you think the future media will look like?

Cook: There's no need to repel what's called user-produced content (user-generated), some traditional media or graphic publishing companies, who are afraid to hear users ' own content because they don't trust the user. But I think this is the only way to make users feel connected, media companies to know, users write something, is the reader most want to see content, such a connection is the largest.

How much time do you spend on Myyearbook?

Cook: At least 40 hours a week, I spend 60 hours a week during the summer vacation, about 25-40 hours a week, and it depends. After going to college, I hope to be able to maintain the same time, I guess I will often skip class.

Do you want to go to college altogether?

Cook: Of course, I'm doing a good job right now, but I still want to try and decide.