Beme and the Threshold Rule
CNN announced today that they were going to acquire a social media application called Beme, a deal that was valued at 25 million dollars. This app allows you to send 4 second un-edited videos into a social media platform. Unlike Instagram and Snapchat, the user cannot modify their content before sending it. In the article, CNN said they would shut down the application in order to have the two co-founders and their 11 employees work on CNNs mobile video efforts. The app had 1.2 million downloads before downloads slowed due to the competition with Snapchat and Instagram. The decline and ultimate shutdown of the application is due to the lack of adoption of this technology. Because one of the co-founders of the app, Casey Neistat, is a YouTube star with a following of 5.8 million people, there was a large amount of early adopters of this technology. However, the adoption of the app petered out eventually, which can be attributed largely to people’s ties to other technologies.
Many people are attached to their social media platforms of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Beme’s inability to compete at a high level with these companies may have led to their downfall. The threshold rule is when at least q fraction of your friends use technology A, you should use it as well. In this case, the threshold for people to switch to Beme from Snapchat or another social media platform may have been too high.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/technology/cnn-brings-in-the-social-app-beme-to-cultivate-a-millennial-audience.html?ref=technology&_r=0
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cnn-buys-casey-neistats-video-app-beme-1480353128