Yubo is a French Social media service that has garnered the attention of some 40 million users who are under the age of 25 has managed to raise about US$47.5 million in funding to further its course.
With the new round of funds it got, it’s expected to gain as much as US$20 million which will be the double of what it made back in 2019.
Yubo work by allowing its users to purchase features rather than selling ads spaces like Facebook or Twitter, subscribers will need to pay a fee to unlock new features as report showed that a fraction of the current users of the service hang in to live-stream and meet ne people.
The company recently closed its Series C funding round of US$47.5 million which got its funding from its existing investors such as Idinvest Partners, Iris Capital, Alven and Sweet Capital while Gaia Capital Partners is newcomer while Jerry Murdock of Insight Partners will be joining the company’s board members.
To further explain what the service is all about, Yubo wants to reverse the trend of current mainstream social networking services which means users can’t follow one another or even like contents created by others.
This is something that is the current trend on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube or TikTok and even LinkedIn. In such scenario, there are always those who stand on the virtual stage and enjoy the majority of the attention as being the sole creators while the rest are mere consumers and with that, influencers emerge and then turn on the limelight to themselves in a monopolistic attention grabbing manners.
But in the case of Yubo, everyone is the creator and so the service is meant to help you meet new people, play games, hang out with people and connect with old friends from high school.
For example, when you land on the homepage of the Yubo application, there are list of rooms which you can join and then users can live stream directly using their smartphones and also chat with others.
Joining rooms is simple all depends on what you’re really interested in doing or who you want to talk to. With this, the service merely bring everyone together in a connected way whereby no one is owning a virtual platform as an influencer which is good for some users but definitely not the best for those who merely use social media as a means of consuming content and don’t want to have any part in contributing to the content creation process whatsoever.
“In 95% of rooms, there are only streamers. Rooms have between 5 and 10 people on average,” co-founder and CEO Sacha Lazimi told me.
You can add people as friends and chat with them in the app. In addition to rooms, you can find new friends by swiping left and right on profile pages — an interaction borrowed from Tinder.
“We had 25 million registered users in December. Today, we have more than 40 million users,” Lazimi said. Most users are based in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and France.
The service has been experiencing some number of user and increase in engagement with about 400% year-over-year increase. Unlike Twitch, there is no tipping feature because as mentioned earlier, no one is owning any virtual platform here.
There is in-app purchases as well as subscriptions which will get users newer features such as being able to boost their live stream, promote profile as well as feature profile at the top of the online section.
“We think it’s the future of monetization for social platforms. If you focus on ads, you’re competing with Facebook, TikTok and Snap,” Lazimi said.
As for moderation, Yubo is said to be investing heavily on real-time moderation processes while also trying to enforce strict rules on its users. Singing up for an account on the service gets you boxed in with the age group the system feels is right for you.
“We analyze all content both semantically and visually,” Lazimi said. The company is currently working on alert popups to tell users that they’re doing something inappropriate while it’s happening.
The service is currently in 36 languages and the company has about 30 employees in Paris, London and Jacksonville while there are plans to open an office in New York.
Being a new service, there is a number of features coming on soon to the service such as the company working on building to integrate its service with YouTube content which can be accessible from a rom as well as partnering with Snap to bring on the Camera Kit as well as building its own AR lenses for users.
