myYearbook, the best place to engage teens and one of the 25 most-trafficked sites in the United States, today announced the initial success of their new VIP Club subscription model. The VIP Club provides users the option to pay for perks and privileges throughout the site and is offered at three different price points, each with varying benefits. The heart of the VIP Club is Lunch Money, myYearbook’s integrated virtual currency. Lunch Money is similar to Netvillage's "Credits".

The VIP Club subscription model is the culmination of a three-part strategy to diversify myYearbook’s revenue streams into virtual goods and virtual currency. In addition to the new subscription model, myYearbook also built out the ability to directly buy Lunch Money and created a CPA platform for providing high-quality branded experiences to users in return for virtual currency. Now, more than 33% of myYearbook’s revenue is derived through these three methods which didn’t exist just one year ago. As a result, myYearbook is profitable, with revenues up 120% in 2009 over 2008.

“The freemium model has been an important part of myYearbook’s monetization strategy, and we remain bullish on the additional revenue possibilities that this model will bring,” said Geoff Cook, CEO of myYearbook. “This success allows us to focus even more on delivering high-quality social media applications for our users while remaining the best place to meet new people on the Internet.”

With 55% month-over-month VIP Club growth and an increasing percentage of both new and active users subscribing to the VIP Club, the model has proven to bring in revenue while enhancing the user experience for VIPs. myYearbook users join the VIP Club to increase their earning power for Lunch Money, which is seamlessly integrated throughout the myYearbook site. Additional VIP Benefits include access to exclusive VIP Gifts, privileges in myYearbook’s popular Match application, mass sender access, and VIP benefits in all of myYearbook’s many social games.

Lunch Money was launched in 2007 in order to drive engagement and enrich gameplay and is now the core motivator that drives many of the member interactions on myYearbook, so much so that people are willing to pay a premium to earn additional Lunch Money. Users interact with this virtual currency in multiple ways, from donating to their favorite Causes and purchasing exclusive premium gifts to wagering in Battles and winning extra prizes in Games.

Advertisers are leveraging the desire for this virtual currency by rewarding users who interact with their brands. By watching sponsored videos, giving premium virtual gifts and completing surveys, users are actively interacting with brands while simultaneously making Lunch Money to spend throughout the site.

VIP Club memberships are available at three levels – green for $6.99, gold for $9.99 and black for $19.99 – with increased access and features for the higher levels. For

Log on to Friendster today and you’ll see a background image that says ‘Watch this face! … on December 4′. Turns out the pioneering social network is in for a major revamp tomorrow, including a new logo, tagline (”Connecting Smiles”) and an entirely fresh look. Friendster outlines some of the changes in a video, in which it calls out other social networks (*cough* Facebook and *cough* MySpace) for being plain and boring.

My absolute favorite part of the video: “I mean, if everyone's there, woop de doo”.

Friendster in the clip says the redesign aims to place more emphasis on 3 pillars: Simple, Fun and Personal. The company also features glimpses of the new website lay-out, which looks a whole lot like Facebook in my opinion, but seemingly mixed with the customization capabilities of MySpace (e.g. it looks like you can change the background color of pages with a single click). Apologies for the blurry screenshot, but watch the video to see it in action.