When social networking companies myYearbook and Quepasa merged last year, myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook told employees that his goal was to “build an enduring, global brand for meeting new people.” That’s still the plan, but the company is announcing that it will build that brand under a new name — MeetMe.
Cook (who’s now COO) says both the myYearbook and Quepasa names don’t quite capture the current vision. myYearbook started out as a social working site for high schoolers, and even though it evolved into more of a social discovery service — one that’s increasingly mobile — the name still reflected its early roots. Meanwhile, Quepasa, which tries to do something similar for a Latin American audience, has a name suggesting a regional social network.
So starting in July, the myYearbook website, smartphone apps, tablet apps, and mobile website will all be rebranded as MeetMe. Then in September, the company plans to finish internationalizing myYearbook/MeetMe into Spanish and Portuguese, and that site will be replace the existing Quepasa product. The company itself, currently called Quepasa Corporation, will be renamed MeetMe, and it plans to change its stock ticker symbol (it’s traded on NYSE Amex) from QPSA to MEET sometime this summer.
“Having a single brand just makes it much easier to talk about the aims of the company,” Cook says. It should help with word-of-mouth, and also give MeetMe a single name for its continued international expansion. The name even performed well in test ad campaigns that the company ran earlier.
There’s plenty of competition for the industry crown, with competition from companies like Tagged and Badoo, not to mention new approaches to social discovery (albeit ones that are less directly competitive) like Highlight. Still, Cook sounds happy with MeetMe’s progress, claiming 2.8 billion pageviews per month, an Android app that was ranked the top-grossing social app by Google Play, and $36.8 million in revenue in 2011. And now his company has a name that spells out its “meet new people” goals more clearly than anyone else.