By Azam Khan on May 6, 2010 6:22 PM

Social Gaming Summit 2010: Building Social Games For Your Platform

Jeff Cook, founder of MyYearBook, showcased MyYearBook as an up and coming social network and a place to meet new people. Founded 5 yrs ago, the social platform has grown to 80 employees and generating roughly $20 million revenue a year. Standing in stark contrast to Facebook where users are bound by their real social graph, MyYearBook will focus on content discovery, user compatibility, dynamic stream interactions and opening its doors for social games. Will it prevail?

MyYearbook as a stand alone site has seen decent growth over the years. They’ve continued to innovate by: improving their compatibility system that allows users to meet and play games with others; adding a dynamic stream known as chatter that encourages user interactions and content discovery. MyYearbook members spend approximately 39% of their time on chatter and 33% on apps. With over 70% of MyYearbook users looking to meet new people, the current strategy seems to be in line with what users want.

MyYearbook is also taking note of an increasingly prolific virtual economy. 1/3 of its revenue comes from virtual goods and virtual currency. They also offer an integrated virtual currency system called LunchMoney, similar to a system Hi5 has implemented. Opportunities for monetizing users with virtual goods takes place in games like Blind date and 2 Truths and a Lie which can be played within a dynamic stream. To proliferate their efforts, MyYearbook will be looking to open its API to certain 3rd party developers where they will offer free promotion on the home page, flexible marketing channels such as notifications and profile boxes, tight chatter integration and virtual currency integration in exchange for revenue share.

It’s too early to say how difficult it will be for developers to adapt without any released information on MyYearbook’s API. For now, MyYearbook will look to raise interest amongst IP and gaming companies that want to target the teenage market, comprising 37% of the users, as well as the 55+ market. We will continue to track MyYearbook’s progress over time.