Why Vero and Others Don’t Make It
The vast majority of people I know have three main social media apps: Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. Some also use Twitter, Reddit, and VSCO, but the majority of people I know have the first three. The article linked below, from TIME, talks about a new social media app called Vero. The app was released in 2015 and never truly blown up to the degree of its previously mentioned competitor. As the article mentions “Vero is the latest in a long line of would-be Instagram and Facebook killers, including the likes of Ello, Mastodon, Peach, and, most recently, Sarahah.” So, what has kept these apps from being successful?
Initially, the lack of success could be accredited to Vero lacking a substantive number of initial users. The app is paid though, and to kickstart the userbase the company gave away one million lifetime subscriptions. This helped get the users rolling and the app had nearly 3 million users at one point according to a Barron’s article. When Facebook bought Instagram, a billion-dollar transaction, the app only had 30 million users. While 30 million is obviously a significant amount more than 3 million it is only ten times greater. 30 million is also a reachable number from 3 million. I personal think that Vero had enough initial users to blow up to a huge scale and the reason it did not can be explained by the threshold model of diffusion.
In the threshold model a new technology or behavior will be adopted by someone if a high enough percentage of people in their network are also using it. This could apply to software in an office that coworkers are using, or in this case, friends using a social media site. In the threshold model there is a single value, often represented by q, which represents the percentage of neighbors using the new technology a person must have in order to switch to that new technology. The threshold model explains why many apps like Vero have not seen the success they want despite having so many users—they don’t reach beyond the threshold for individuals. For example, I was one of the users who received a free account from Vero, and at the time I was happy. Still, I did not use the app because I was the only one of my friends who knew about it. Had more of my friends also had an account I could still be using the app today.
What is the threshold that an app like Vero would need to takeoff and become successful? It is hard to say, especially without an extremely complex model of the whole network. In an attempt to understand what this number might have been I constructed a quick survey for my friends to fill out. I asked them, “Of ten close friends, what number of them would you need to use a new social media in order for you to adopt it as well.” The answers that I received were: 6, 4, 4, 3, 8, 4, 5, 4, 5, and 5. This averages out to 4.8, and since the question is roughly asking about a q value, I would expect the q value to be .48. On average, my friends would need around 5 of their friends to adopt the new app for them to do so as well. That is why apps like Vero have such a hard time succeeding. Even if they are successful in establishing a relatively large user base, they need a stronger foothold within friend groups to expand. They need to break the threshold. More social media “killers” will come and go, but if one decides to invest in initial users within one group maybe they will rise above the threshold and let natural diffusion do the rest of the work.
https://time.com/5178976/vero-app-ceo/
https://www.barrons.com/articles/facebook-rival-vero-faces-a-user-backlash-1519924496