20 Mar What is Vero, and why is everyone talking about it?
What is Vero, and why is everyone talking about it?
In the last few months, Facebook and Instagram have changed dramatically in terms of what we are ‘allowed’ to see. Gone are the days of your News Feed bringing you endless content to scroll through when you’re laying in bed at night…in fact we have reached the end of our News Feeds before a minute has passed!
In order for businesses to reach their potential clients in the social sphere, they’re forced to pay for the privilege. Ads have become a constant in our lives, and social media channels have become full of them, with companies constantly vying for the opportunity to be seen before the viewer flicks past.
In steps Vero.
An app, launched in 2015, that only a week ago didn’t rank in the top 1500 apps is now the most popular app in the entire App Store, with so many new users and such a surge in popularity that the servers have been overloaded, with many users unable to post or even sign up for an account. Quite a feat!
What is Vero?
The app, launched in 2015, promotes itself as an ad-free ‘social network that lets you be yourself’. Vero allows you to assign contacts to a ‘connection type’, meaning you can filter who sees what content you post depending on if they are ‘family, close friend, acquaintance or follower’. This level of personalisation, Vero says, will mean people are more able to be themselves.
Vero pushes strongly that it doesn’t use algorithms to present content to you, everything is shown to you in reverse-chronological order.
While this theory is good in concept, we wonder what they will do if, like Facebook, they end up with billions of users all posting endless content, could they possibly still show all content to you? A perk of the timeline is that you can filter what you see by your connections, by type (photo, URL, text) or you can browse by hashtag.
So how does Vero make money?
In short, Vero doesn’t make any money…at least not yet. They have made it quite clear that eventually, users will need to pay to use the service, other than the first million who have been promised free subscriptions for life! CNBC reported the fee will likely be ‘a few dollars a year’. This subscription-based service will provide them with the bulk of their revenue, with the remainder coming from cuts Vero will take of products companies sell within the app.
Why is Vero so popular now?
In 2015 when Vero first launched, it got very little attention, despite briefly reaching No.45 in the App Store’s social networking category, it dropped off the charts entirely soon after.
That changed in the last few days however, rocketing from No.566 to No.1 in a matter of days! It will soon go from 600,000 lifetime downloads in the App Store and Google Play, to more than 500,000 in one day.
It is not entirely clear what has prompted this sudden surge in popularity, but it appears to be, at least in part, due to frustrations with Instagram’s algorithm, which has been causing tension for months, leading a lot of artists and photographers to turn to Vero where the feed is chronological, not determined by what Instagram deem to be important to show.
Who knows whether this popularity will last or if it is just a craze, is yet to be seen. If they want to capitalise on the popularity however, they will need to resolve their server issues before people get annoyed with it before it’s even started!
We’ll be signing up and having a play with Vero, and we’ll report back on whether it’s worth the hype, and who knows, maybe soon we’ll all be using Vero and wonder why we ever used Instagram in the first place!