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Type of site | Avatar |
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Dissolved | December 2017 |
Headquarters | San Francisco, California [1] |
Owner | Donnerwood Media |
Key people | Sean Ryan (founder) |
URL | www.meez.com |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Required |
Launched | March 28, 2006 |
Current status | Defunct |
Meez was a free-to-play virtual world [2] that launched on March 28, 2006. Meez was developed by Donnerwood Media (a company based in San Francisco, California, that were also the license-holders for Tringo) as an "online entertainment" social networking service. It was founded by Sean Ryan, [3] the former vice president of the music service RealNetworks. Meez's CEO, John Cahill, was a former Yahoo executive.
Meez's main draw was the Meez Nation, where users could visit several regions, known as "Hoods", to chat with other users in chat rooms. [4] Meez had over three million unique users, who would spend 60 hours a month on the site. There were 13 million registered Meez users by the time the site had become discontinued, 90% of whom were in the United States. [5] Meez advertisers included Nike, Rocawear, Domo, Coast, the NBA and the NHL. [6] MIS Quarterly estimated that its users were primarily children and teenagers. [2]
In 2007, Meez was named one of the Internet's five worst websites by TIME. [7]
Meez went offline in December 2017, [8] with no warning to its users, and its site domain later expired in March 2018. Donnerwood Media has not given any statements about how or why Meez was taken offline.