What was SchülerVZ? This is a question that young people who were born or grew up in the age of Facebook and TikTok are asking themselves.
What was SchülerVZ? The German Facebook
Facebook has been one of the most successful social media platforms for years. But there was life before Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg did not develop the concept of an online diary with an interactive function.
- In this country, other platforms were very popular in the early 2000s. After MeinVZ and StudiVZ, SchülerVZ followed in 2007.
- It was a kind of online yearbook where students could network and talk about their everyday lives and hobbies. The practical thing: members were automatically connected to each other via the school they attended.
- As with Facebook, users on SchülerVZ could create a profile of themselves and state which school they are currently attending. To ensure that the target group, who are usually minors, can interact with the platform in a well-protected manner, SchülerVZ had an upper age limit of 21 years.
- Those who were older had the option of switching to MeinVZ or StudiVZ (for students). Those who remained on SchülerVZ or registered at the age of 21 were promptly kicked out of the system. Their profiles were then automatically deleted.
- One year after SchülerVZ was launched, the portal already had around 2.7 million users and over 100 million hits in 2008. This means that each SchülerVZ member logged in on average once a day. At that time, Facebook, which was already growing successfully in the USA, did not yet play a role among German schoolchildren.
The end of SchülerVZ: That's why the platform no longer exists
At the time, SchülerVZ offered students completely new ways of communicating and being reachable. At the beginning of the 2000s, there was no way to be constantly online and “check” the status of friends.
- SchülerVZ offered exactly that – one reason why the network was so popular and successful for several years.
- It was also possible to write to classmates or even your crush from the parallel class via messenger. It was also possible to “gush” someone. This imaginary term meant that you could nudge someone – a kind of loving digital gesture for people you liked.
- But in 2009 and 2010, SchülerVZ's heyday was over quite quickly. The reason was “data protection scandals”. Massive data leaks became public. Even improvements to SchülerVZ didn't help much.
- More and more members moved to the ever-growing competitor Facebook. Although the profiles on SchülerVZ remained for the time being, the active usage figures continued to tumble.
- As a result, more and more advertisers dropped out, an important source of income was lost – not to mention the loss of image. At this time, SchülerVZ became a kind of zombie city – deserted and empty.
- In April 2013, SchülerVZ pulled the plug and closed the platform. The operators publicly announced that the network would be shut down on April 30, 2013. This gave members time to back up their data.
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