Teen hits paydirt with myYearbook.com

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By KARA L. RICHARDSON
Gannett News Service

Catherine Cook is 17 years old, and runs a business that brought in millions in sales in its first year. The Montgomery (N.J.) High School senior founded www.myYearbook.com in 2005 with her brothers Dave and Geoff Cook. Her inspiration came during spring break as she flipped through a paper yearbook. This should be online, she thought.

"My generation grew up with being online all the time. I had a screen name by sixth grade," said Cook, who is an A student. She dreamed of an interactive Web site that would be as relished as the signature page of a yearbook and be a lot more fun.

Geoff Cook, a self-made millionaire out of Harvard, fronted $250,000 to start the business. That was enough to hire a programming team in India. Catherine Cook was awake all hours of the night, messaging back and forth with the team and sending pages and pages of templates.

Since www.myYearbook.com's promise is to never charge its members, her company makes its money through advertising. It attracts companies trying to sell music, movies and ringtones to her teenage audience. It now boasts sales in the millions.

"I never expected to build such a large site," Cook said.

But the week after launching it, she knew it was going to be big. Within seven days, 200 Montgomery High School students signed up as www.myYearbook.com members.

She opened the site to all schools. In nine months, she had 1 million members. In a year, the membership grew to 1.5 million. New members are signing on at a clip of 6,000 per day. According to Nielsen/Net Ratings data, 2.4 million unique visitors went to www.myYearbook.com in October of 2006.

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