Whoa, Classmates.com Makes Money!

Yesterday Classmates.com announced a record quarter with the addition of 322,000 paid accounts. The company recorded earnings of $51.9 million (comparable to quarterly earnings of Facebook) and a total of 50 million registered members. I wasn’t aware that their site was still growing and I’ve never thoroughly explored their site but they have some pretty impressive numbers.

Conversely, when comparing Facebook’s revenue to Classmates.com’s revenues, it appears that advertising has been an equally effective model to Classmates.com’s pay for service model. While Classmates.com is not seeing the astronomical growth that Facebook is (who adds over 250,000 new accounts a day), they are still growing and this emphasizes how there is still room for large social networking sites targeting the same space.

I don’t have information about Classmates.com demographics but I would guess that it is comprised of older generations that are looking to connect with the people they went to high school with. The younger generations are growing up on MySpace and Facebook and are not in need of such services since they maintain contact with others for an entire lifetime.

Are you on Classmates.com or know anybody that is? Would you pay for a social networking site?

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.