Classmates.Com Offering School Yearbooks at a Price

Classmates.com is a website that has been around for a while now. It allows people from particular schools to contact one another, put together reunions and find people that you lost contact with after high school. It was once a great site to get everyone together from your school years but may not be as necessary as it once was before social networking took hold in the form of websites like FaceBook. Classmates needed a new way to attract people to the site. The idea they came up with was to add yearbooks to the site.

This fairly new feature would be great for some people who never got their yearbook from high school or who have lost theirs along life's path. In any case, this isn't going to be a likely advertising gimmick to get people to sign up for the service. People have tended to drift away from the site for several reasons. Lack of a high school yearbook wasn't one of them. Classmates.com didn't address the most important issue. People aren't willing to spend hard earned money to join such a site for the rest of their lives. There is a chance that some people will join the site in order to find and talk to someone specific. Once that has occurred, it isn't likely they will be repeat customers. There are far too many sites that allow you to find people free of charge today. For instance, instead of searching through Classmates.com, people are more likely to look through Facebook.com because it is a free service to use.

It is up to the individual person as to whether they would want to pay for a service simply because there is now a yearbook available. The trick is that you aren't necessarily going to find your yearbook on those pages. There are only a choice few yearbooks available on the site as of this time. That means that your yearbook may not be anywhere near being placed on Classmates.com. In fact, there is no guarantee that you will ever see your high school yearbook there. People in the United States are less likely now than ever before to purchase a membership to a website for the sole purpose of seeing an old yearbook. The reason is that the priority for a yearbook isn't nearly as high as the priority to keep our finances in order and to put money away for the future. We aren't so quick to spend money as we once were.

The Classmates.com website might have something here. It could boost their site quite a bit. Chances are, though, that the idea will flop because they are doing it at one of the worst possible times, when the American people are still trying to recover from the financial hardships that they have recently had to face. What might do the trick is if Classmates.com could come up with an idea to open the site completely up to members so that they can at least send message back and forth with each other. The site is nearly inaccessible unless you have a paid membership and many people just aren't willing to do that. They yearbook idea is a great one, however, it might have served the site better to do one of two things. They do offer that you can purchase a copy of the yearbook for your home. There are many people who never got their yearbook or have lost it along the way and this could be very lucrative. The site might have been better served to let people have views of the yearbooks that are available online and only charge for copies of the yearbooks. The other option would have been for Classmates.com to start an advertising revenue site rather than charging the members for anything. There are several ways that a site can do this and Classmates would have probably been more successful with a campaign like that.

Wouldn't it be great if a site that has always charged for every service suddenly sent an email telling you that there would not longer be a charge for the service? It is possible these days. That is evident with sites like FaceBook. Sites like Classmates.com have slowly begun to die down. There is a chance that we will see them die off permanently. The website Reunion.com is no longer named that. It is now called MyLife.com. The site still shows that it is Reunion.com, but the drastic changes to the site made it a completely different idea than it started out to be. Classmates.com needed to come up with a new strategy, that is a certainty. What isn't as certain is whether the yearbook addition will aid in bringing more people to the site and then getting them to sign up for membership. Time will tell.