![]() ![]() “We love products heavily adopted by teens, since they predict the future of consumption, and the organic global teen adoption of YouNow is just amazing to watch,” Venrock’s David Pakman says. Sideman says in the past year the company has gone from 15 employees to 40, with plans to continue to expand. YouNow, which has raised $11 million from Venrock and Union Square Ventures, is still growing. “A lot of people got to perform in front of their favorite artists.” “It was a really cool experience,” Veronica says. While the Merrells got that role through their agent, they say they’ve also gotten opportunities through YouNow and YouTube.Īt the MTV Video Music Awards last year, they said, YouNow and MTV had a partnership in which YouNowers were livestreaming on the red carpet, singing covers of their favorite artists’ songs so the artists could watch. “It was way out of our personalities! It’s not who we are.” “We were the evil twin stepsisters, who were very mean,” Veronica says. In addition, the twins have been cast in “Jane the Virgin,” a sitcom on the CW. We also do charades and trivia,” Vanessa says. We’ll start humming a song or playing a song on guitar and they guess the song, and whoever guesses the song first gets to pick a letter for Hangman. They livestream every Tuesday, singing covers of songs that fans request, playing games with viewers, answering their questions, and giving advice to people who want it. “ like posting a video every Tuesday on YouTube,” Vanessa says. The Merrells, who are currently in high school with plans to attend college in the future, say YouNow has become part of their weekly routine. “The fact that the camera faces IN as default, not out, suggests how valuable we believe conversation is to the success of this format.” “What makes YouNow so different from and more valuable than some competing livestreaming apps is that many of those are utilities used to broadcast, not media creation platforms rooted in social discovery,” he says. He says what drew him to YouNow is how inherently social it is. We always ask, Where are you from? Who’s watching us right now? And we get answers form all over the world. It’s just amazing to see all these people from around the world come together and chat with each other and just have fun.”ĭavid Pakman is a partner at venture capital firm Venrock, which led YouNow’s $7 million Series B round of funding in August 2014. “We get to play games with our fans, we get to see where they’re from. “We don’t just read the comments,” Vanessa said. The sisters genuinely love interacting with their community of fans. While they say they do make “a good amount” of money from YouTube and YouNow alike - “the more and more viewers we get on our broadcasts the more money comes in,” Vanessa says - they’ve never been motivated by money. After being on the platform for about 9 months, the high schoolers have amassed 76,000 YouNow fans in addition to their 250,000 YouTube subscribers. YouNow audience members can pay to give gifts like 50 thumbs ups to their favorite broadcaster to help them trend on YouNow.įor the Merrell twins, YouNow has come naturally. Tumblr star and Internet personality Tyler Oakley raised half a million dollars on crowdfunding website Prizeo for The Trevor Project, a charity that raises awareness for LGBT youths at risk of suicide, and linked to his YouNow account in a sort of modern-day telethon. Last year, Vine star Shawn Mendes released a single on YouNow. Teens, a demographic with a lot of time on their hands, as suggested by the ever-popular #bored hashtag on YouNow, do everything from talk to the camera, eat dinner while they talk to their community of followers, dance, and even livestream themselves sleeping (For a more thorough explainer on YouNow’s fascinating #sleepingsquad, I defer to BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopolous). The theory behind YouNow is that people crave social interaction in every form, and YouNow is the perfect platform for that. When you use YouNow’s platform, you can see the top trending broadcasters, as well as which of your friends are online and a number of trending tags, including things like #dance, #truthordare, and #advice. And the audience feels like even though it’s a one-to-many, it feels like a one-to-one interaction.” The secret sauce is that it’s all about the audience. “It’s a global platform for self expression,” he said. If you still can’t quite wrap your head around what YouNow is, Sideman puts it best: The collision of these trends led Sideman to start YouNow in 2011.
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