It spilled out: MeinVZ and StudiVZ are terminating the membership of the last users

Enlarge image

StudiVZ website (archive image): The network closes at the end of March

Photo:

StudiVZ

StudiVZ and MeinVZ will soon be history.

In e-mails to registered users of the former Facebook competitors, the operating company Poolwoorks writes that after more than 16 and 14 years respectively, the networks are "technically so outdated that continued operation makes no sense".

"We are therefore terminating your current user contract at the end of March 31, 2022," Poolworks continues.

“After that, all user data on StudiVZ/MeinVZ will be irrevocably deleted.” Future resources will only be invested in expanding its website for online games.

The two offers, which were once supported by SchülerVZ, had already had a successor called VZ in 2020.

Even then, Poolworks was planning to switch off StudiVZ and MeinVZ.

But things turned out differently, and in July 2021 the company even buried its idea of ​​the new VZ by announcing that it would convert the network into a gaming platform.

»Last monetized only as gaming platforms«

A current blog post by Poolworks says that the online games from the VZ network are being worked on at full speed to transfer the offers: "There will probably be migration options for all games."

Agneta Binninger, the head of the VZ networks, told SPIEGEL that the old offers, and mainly MeinVZ, had “ultimately only been monetized as gaming platforms”.

Binninger went on to say that the "slump in the Russian market" had also "made itself felt" in her company's sales.

In the meantime, StudiVZ and MeinVZ are so old that modernization no longer makes economic sense.

"Some of the main partners, such as 'Dorfleben', for example, completely migrated the users' saves, so that we were able to implement the best possible transition for the users," emphasized Binninger.

"Instructions for continuing to play" will be published on Saturday.

On the way to irrelevance

Notices about the closure of the networks, which are known among other things for their "sneaky" function, can now also be found on their home pages.

In the same place it had previously been said that no data would be deleted without prior notice.

That promise is now gone.

At two weeks, however, the deadline for saving old chats or photos is quite tight.

StudiVZ, founded in 2005, was one of Germany's most popular social networks in the years after it was launched, and MeinVZ was also considered popular.

Especially with Facebook, however, the networks could not keep up in the long run.

In 2015 it was said that only a good one million of the once 16 million regular users of the VZ networks were still active.

Even then, StudiVZ was teetering towards irrelevance, while other platforms such as Instagram were booming.

In 2017, the operating company filed for bankruptcy.

StudiVZ and MeinVZ still survived for four and a half years - until now.