Dot-com’s success is in a class by itself (What’s your idea?)

SITE FINDS SUCCESS BY LOCATING FRIENDS FROM HIGH SCHOOL

RENTON, Wash. – A small Seattle-area
company has seized on a new formula for
Internet success — nostalgia.

By Kristi Heim
Mercury News Seattle Bureau

Whatever happened to your high school
prom date? Did the homecoming king become
a well-heeled lawyer or a beer-guzzling
couch potato? Classmates.com is making
millions of dollars helping people find out.

Classmates.com has bucked the trend of
money-losing, advertising-dependent Web
sites by connecting people to their old
flames, long-lost buddies and even children
they never knew they had.

Former class leaders and losers can use the
site to compare how they stack up now, from
the cars they drive to the pets they keep.
And dozens of marriages have resulted from
childhood sweethearts finding each other on
the site after decades apart.

Classmates.com has managed to rack up
more than 30 million registered users — a
quarter of the U.S. Internet audience. The company is starting a magazine next month and trying to
turn its members’ sentimental stories into a new reality TV show. With 1.7 million paying customers,
Classmates boasts nearly three times as many subscribers as the Wall Street Journal Online, and
Media Metrix ranks it the ninth most visited Internet site after Amazon.com.

“It’s perfect for baby boomers now reaching that stage in life where they start thinking about
mortality and the value of friendship,” said Tim Miller, president of Webmergers, a San Francisco
company that tracks Internet business.

Miller calls this growing niche of online services that help people connect — and reconnect — “one
of the few oases in a dot-com desert right now. The whole industry is rushing around looking for a
business model, so it’s very interesting to see one that’s working.”

Nostalgic Web surfers can freely look at lists of their old classmates by school and graduation year,
as long as they register themselves. Users then have to buy a subscription to send messages or
find out more information. About 2 million people have paid the annual fee — currently $36 — to send
e-mail to other members, view their pictures and biographies, and compare themselves to their
classmates in a dozen categories from income to political bent. Modesto residents Landon Tymochko
and Deanna Watson, who were friends in high school 14 years ago, reunited through the Web site
and plan to marry next month.

In high school, “I was secretly in love with him, but was desperately afraid to tell him,” Watson
admits. The two kept in touch for a while, then drifted apart. After college Tymochko joined the Army
and was sent to Bosnia, where loneliness drove him to seek out old friends from home through
Classmates. He found Watson listed there and they corresponded, meeting again when he
returned.

“He went on there, saw my name and that started everything,” Watson said. “Short of divine
intervention, I don’t think we would have gotten together otherwise.”

For Brian Robinson of Livermore, two marriages and 31 years failed to erase memories of the
16-year-old bohemian classmate who gave him his first kiss. The 51-year-old engineer searched five
years for Dottie Higgason before finding her through Classmates. They reunited a year ago and
were married last month.

“`I thought about Brian all my life,” said Higgason, 50, a health care administrator. So the
independent business traveler, confirmed bachelorette and workaholic gave up a high-level job in a
company she helped found, packed her bags and relocated from Southern California to Livermore to
be with Robinson.

“There was a soft spot in my heart for him,” she said. “I guess you never forget that first kiss.”
Classmates.com isn’t the only Internet site devoted to satisfying the desire to reunite.
Militarybrats.com, ClassReunion.com and Reunions.com serve the same purpose, but
Classmates.com is by far the biggest.

Last year, when more than 500 Internet companies shut down or declared bankruptcy, Classmates
began to turn its first profit. It has been profitable for almost a year now, although, as a privately
held company, its executives won’t disclose figures. They will say they’re expecting profit this year to
be in the millions of dollars.

It all started when a Boeing contract manager had trouble finding a high school buddy 25 years
after graduation. The experience inspired Randy Conrads, 53, to create Classmates.com in 1995.
Conrads is now chairman of the board but leaves daily management of the company to Chief
Executive Michael Schutzler.

Ironically, the bursting of the Internet bubble gave a critical boost to Classmates. The company’s
business languished for the first few years until the collapse of the Web’s inflated advertising rates,
Schutzler said. Then, Classmates took advantage of cheap rates to blast its message on targeted
Web sites like Yahoo, and a wave of new customers followed.

This year Classmates launched a feature called “compare yourself,” which has become wildly
popular, with thousands of profiles filled out on the site each day. Besides reading how specific
classmates are faring, you can find out whether your income level is in the top 10 percent of your
classmates, for example, or what percentage of your classmates went on to get advanced degrees,
marry, divorce or have kids.

At the same time, an entertainment producer wants to turn Classmates’ reunion stories into fodder
for reality TV.

Matt Papish, president of Pipeline Entertainment and a producer of the popular reality show “Blind
Date,” is working with Classmates to sell member stories to a television network or syndicate. John
Roberts could be one of its first stars. Through his registration on the Classmates Web site, the New
Mexico accountant was contacted by a 30-year-old daughter he never knew he had.

“I was surfing the Net one day and got one of their ads,” said Roberts, 52. “I signed up and
found about 18 people from our class. Then I received an e-mail that changed my life.”

It was from Roberts’ previously unknown daughter, Kirsten Miller. She told him that her mother, a
woman he had dated for a few months just after high school, had become pregnant and given the
baby up for adoption. Later, when Miller began looking for her birth parents, finding her father
proved difficult. An Internet search brought back 18,000 listings for John Roberts. But her mother
remembered a red-and-white letterman’s sweater that Roberts had worn, which led Miller to the
right high school.

“After picking up my chin from the floor, I e-mailed her right back and told her she had been lost for
30 years, and I was not about to allow another minute to go by without knowing and loving her,”
Roberts wrote in a letter thanking Classmates. Last year, Roberts and Miller had their first meeting.

“I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face,” he said.

Classmates is at the forefront of a mass experiment with subscription Internet business.

Classmates will have to figure out a way to keep people coming back even after their heartfelt
reunions. The service passes e-mail between members, but once people connect they’re likely to
contact each other directly.

Schutzler thinks he has the answer. He plans to expand the service to the United Kingdom, Canada
and Hong Kong.

“The need to connect with people isn’t just a phenomenon happening here,” he said. “There’s a
whole world out there that does the same thing.’

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