As the years go by, the amount of people who have never experienced a life without the Internet increases, quite rapidly overtaking those who grew up before the absolute explosion of the online lifestyle. Toddler's have their faces stuffed into iPads, tweens today have never known a life without social media to connect with their peers and make friends.
From Myspace to Facebook, AIM to messenger, and all the other platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and Snapchat, people are more connected today than they have ever been -- on a global scale. These free apps are well known, and keep pumping out updates to improve user experience and stay relevant. Though each app is a collective of all kinds of media sharing, they each seem to have their own main niche -- for example, YouTube focuses on video, Instagram focuses on photos, Facebook focuses on text, and so on. Each niche is covered by an app, and each app is well known and popular, tried and true. So what would you say if another social media app was about to join the holy bundle of ones already used today?
Vero, as it's called, is an app that is actually around two years old that is only now gaining attention. People are always looking for the next big thing, and with the "adpocalypse" steadily drowning users in ads and advertisements, people are looking towards this advertisement-free platform. Their business model states as not being based on serving ads.
"As a subscription-based service, our users are our customers, not the product we sell to advertisers. Our subscription model will allow us to keep Vero advertising-free, and to focus solely on delivering the best social experience instead of trying to find new ways to monetize our users' behavior or tricking them back into the app with notifications."CEO, Ayman Hariri and the makers of Vero are playing on the factor of FOMO, or "Fear of Missing out," to gain their audience as their first million users will be grandfathered into the app free for life, no annual fee. Since the announcement, they've decided to increase that number for all new users until further notice -- the user count is currently over three million.
Despite the small annual fee, people are quickly taking to this new app as it has a few notable quirks offered that other social media platforms do not (besides the no ads), like posts being in chronological order, new categories like links, books, movies, etc., greater personal control for the user in addition to a cleaner looking feed, and even a feature that all other platforms lack -- a tracker for time spent on the app. According to their Manifesto, "Time Spent" or "addiction" is not viewed as a measure of success like it is for others. They recognize the struggle to balance real life and online life as this world we live in rapidly delves ever deeper into technological dependance, and have provided an in-app Usage Info that shows the user exactly how much time is being spent on the platform.
Do you think Vero will come out on top despite their subscription-based model? Will the added features be worth the price, or will people stick to the free social media platforms already tried and true?
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