The live-streaming app where amateurs get paid to talk, eat, and sleep on camera
Tayser Abuhamdeh doesn’t have what most people would call an arousing job. He works behind the counter at a deli in Brooklyn, a petite shop that does a brisk business in snacks, coffee, and cigarettes. In June of last year, on a quirk and mostly out of boredom, Abuhamdeh mounted his phone next to the register and began to broadcast his day on YouNow, a live streaming service. His treat was Mr. Cashier.
“I was talking to myself at very first,” he says. “No one was there. But I was jumpy, I felt like there were people watching. I was quiet. It was weird.” After a few weeks of broadcasting he began to find his rhythm. “Eventually I commenced opening up, telling random things, telling jokes and laughing at my own jokes. I embarked to act like people were there watching, and that’s when they demonstrated up.”
Abuhamdeh’s routine was subtle. People would walk up and pay, he would ring them up, and then as they left, ravage them with a zinger spoken to the camera. If a customer was in on the joke, Abuhamdeh would banter with them a bit. He collective stories from his home life, and leisurely began to invite fans into it, broadcasting from his apartment, from a cousin’s wedding, while driving in his car or getting a haircut.
His broadcasting schedule swelled from one or two hours a day to appearing live in four two-hour sessions. His fanbase grew, but so did his phone bill. “I was using up around 70GB of data each month, and I’m with Verizon so you know that’s not cheap.” He was addicted to the interaction with the audience, but couldn’t afford to keep up with his costs. So he sent a letter to YouNow, which put him on its fucking partner program, permitting him to earn money when his fans left digital tips and gifts.
YouNow launched back in September of 2012, but for its very first year and a half struggled to find traction. Then in May of last year it all of a sudden clicked, exploding from less than ten million monthly visitors to more than one hundred million in the span of just four months. More than 35,000 hours of live movie are now streamed on the service each day, and more than a million dollars in tips flow through its platform each month.
Live streaming is having its moment This growth is part of a broader boom in live streaming services. Meerkat emerged as a media and tech darling, lightly winning the war for attention at this year’s SXSW. It originally piggybacked off of Twitter, but was quickly cut off, likely because Twitter has its own plans for a live streaming service built around a company it just acquired, Periscope. We’ve eventually hit a tipping point where live streaming makes sense, both as a killer feature on a platform like Twitter, but also as a standalone business like YouNow. So why now?
"The reason is the rise of iOS and Android," says Emmett Shear, the CEO of Twitch. He attempted and failed to launch a general purpose live streaming service with Justin.TV. Eventually he pivoted into gaming, a niche where being tied to a desktop computer made sense. But now the mobile market is mature enough for a sea switch. "Smartphones provide all the critical lumps for these fresh services. They take care of distribution through the app store, monetization through in-app purchases, incredible movie quality through cameras and microphones, and connectivity everywhere with LTE internet." The growth and ubiquity of social networks is also "creating an amplifier effect for good consumer products."
YouNow is run by founder and CEO Adi Sideman, who knows very well the long history of failed experiments with live streaming. "It is a fantasy that a lot of people have been thinking about for a long time," Sideman told me, loosening at a conference table in his midtown Fresh York office. "It is a holy grail."
"It is a holy grail." In the 1990s Sideman studied art and technology in Fresh York. He was part of a group that believed everyone would soon be the starlet of their own reality television series, all broadcast on the web. That included the infamous Josh Harris, a dot-com millionaire who imploded for his live audience, chronicled in the documentary We Live in Public. "I was running a media technology agency for a while and attempting to shove this down the mouth of every client, but nobody desired it," Sideman says.
Watching a YouNow stream can be an staggering practice. The comments on popular movies fly by far too quickly for the broadcaster to go after. Often you see streamers squinting to make out a username, attempting to reply in real time to the flood of compliments and questions. "It’s all about the addiction to real time feedback and the knots in the brain that it triggers," Sideman tells me.
Users pay for broadcaster attention Users can give digital gifts, essentially stuffs, like hearts, fistbumps, or beers. These cost coins, which you earn from spending time interacting on YouNow. Users can also give premium goods, which cost money to acquire. A ninety nine cent peak sometimes gets a broadcaster to smile, while more expensive offerings elicit a individual shoutout, or more intimate reaction. The company won’t share what the revenue split is inbetween streamers and YouNow, telling only that broadcasters in the playmate program get "the lion’s share" of their tips. Of course, anyone getting premium goods outside the playmate program gets no cut.
Sideman determines to give me a live demo. He tunes in to the channel of a user named FlippinGinja, a red-headed teenage and inexperienced gymnast who is lounging on his porch sway. "Guys, I’ve been drinking too much water," he tells his smartphone camera. With the press of a few buttons Sideman tips Ginja the equivalent of $Five, along with a message asking him to spin for Ben.
"Everybody comment in the talk. Ben this roll is dedicated to you, for being so awesome. Everybody say, ‘We love Ben’ in the talk." While the talk lights up with people chanting my name, Ginja dashes down his steps onto his front lawn, does an amazing corkscrew backflip, does it again for good measure, and then goes back to the porch, where he proceeds bantering a mile a minute, skimming the comments like a pro, dispensing jokes, attention, and affection in just the right doses.
Despite myself, I feel a rush of excitement, the thrill of having another human perform just for me. "The broadcaster is not the only content creator in the room," says Sideman. "It’s indeed a one to many practice that feels like one to one. That is the heart, the secret. Even payment, there is feedback on the screen, feedback from the broadcaster, feedback from the audience, it’s part of the display."
One of the interesting aspects of Meerkat’s success is how top down it has been. Before it had a sizable user base it blew up on Product Hunt, becoming an overnight darling of influencers in tech and media. Last week Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Al Roker, and Jimmy Fallon all took the service for a spin. Before it had even cracked into the top 1,000 apps in the iOS store, Meerkat was the subject of uncountable articles and had become one more arrow in the quiver for celebrities with well established individual brands. Instead of a photo or movie of someone famous doing something fabulous, you get a livestream instead. But so far it doesn’t have its own community, or any everyman starlets.
YouNow is the finish opposite. It’s one of the top grossing social apps on iOS, but its most popular users are largely unknown teenagers. They aren’t broadcasting from titillating places or doing interesting things. A lot of what happens on YouNow feels like the PG-13 version of Cam Ladies, part confessional conversation, part vaudeville spectacle.
An undercurrent of teenage fervor and longing YouNow cautiously polices and blocks nakedness or sexual content. But the teenagers and tweens that top its charts are fully aware of their own lovemaking appeal. A pair of youthfull brothers joke about turning viewers on before engaging in a fully clothed wrestling match that quickly turns shirtless. A damsel lies in bed and leisurely applies her makeup while a stream of commenters, their powerful breathing palpable, repeatedly ask her age.
That’s not to say everything on YouNow is softcore teenage solipsism. There are slew of striving rappers, guitar players, and dancers. FlippinGinja’s father, after eyeing how much his son was earning, emailed asking if he too could become a paid content playmate. Dad broadcasts extended rants, often while driving, on the state of pop music, politics, his hyperactive son. FlippinDad now regularly pulls in a hundred or more viewer during broadcasts. "So now there is a 2nd camera in this reality display!" Sideman says with excitement.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality. The fascination of the audience seems less tethered to what the person is doing on screen, and more to the amount of time they are willing to spend in front of the camera, the level of proximity they are comfy cultivating. I spoke on the phone with Rudan, a 20-something Texan who dropped out of college, leaving behind a degree in computer science for utter time broadcasting.
"The people who support us will witness us do anything. There are times when I fall asleep on broadcast, and wake up, the stream has been going for ten or twelve hours and people are still watching, still commenting, still providing tips," says Rudan. The talk on his live flows is too busy for a real conversation, but fans engage fans in deeper conversation on Snapchat, and through text messages and phone calls. "They go after you wherever you go, they text you, they embark telling you their story. You become a role model, an inspiration."
While his live stream is typically an upbeat affair, utter of jokes, horseplay and goofy voices, Rudan says the relationships with fans are often fairly serious. "People don’t seem to understand, broadcasting is very strained. The main audience is youthfull teenage women. The largest topic of discussion is suicide and cutting. It gets pretty deep. When I very first began I got depressed." He sees himself as someone they can turn to for convenience and entertainment. "I don’t like to call it counselor, or therapist, but usually that’s what you do when you broadcast. You help people smile, keep them blessed.
We’re all greedy for what we feel is a meaningful connection with our fellow humans. Modern technology is permitting that deep desire to play out in some very strange ways. I ask Sideman, YouNow’s CEO, what he makes of the content on the site he created. "It’s raw. If you look at our homepage, it’s very raw. There is nothing packaged about it. Eventually there will be. But it’s in that titillating stage. It reminds me of the early days of the internet," he says. It remains to be seen if live streaming will have more staying power in the mobile era than it did in the dot-com days.
As we talk Sideman tunes into the channel for Rudan. We catch him shirtless, cooking a meal, singing to himself, and working the talk room. "It’s nice to see people with real talent," he says, "And ‘What is talent?’ is also a excellent subjective question."
The live-streaming app where amateurs get paid to talk, eat, and sleep on camera, The Brink
The live-streaming app where amateurs get paid to talk, eat, and sleep on camera
Tayser Abuhamdeh doesn’t have what most people would call an arousing job. He works behind the counter at a deli in Brooklyn, a puny shop that does a brisk business in snacks, coffee, and cigarettes. In June of last year, on a caprice and mostly out of boredom, Abuhamdeh mounted his phone next to the register and began to broadcast his day on YouNow, a live streaming service. His treat was Mr. Cashier.
“I was talking to myself at very first,” he says. “No one was there. But I was jumpy, I felt like there were people watching. I was quiet. It was weird.” After a few weeks of broadcasting he began to find his rhythm. “Eventually I commenced opening up, telling random things, telling jokes and laughing at my own jokes. I embarked to act like people were there watching, and that’s when they showcased up.”
Abuhamdeh’s routine was subtle. People would walk up and pay, he would ring them up, and then as they left, plow them with a zinger spoken to the camera. If a customer was in on the joke, Abuhamdeh would banter with them a bit. He collective stories from his home life, and leisurely began to invite fans into it, broadcasting from his apartment, from a cousin’s wedding, while driving in his car or getting a haircut.
His broadcasting schedule swelled from one or two hours a day to appearing live in four two-hour sessions. His fanbase grew, but so did his phone bill. “I was using up around 70GB of data each month, and I’m with Verizon so you know that’s not cheap.” He was addicted to the interaction with the audience, but couldn’t afford to keep up with his costs. So he sent a letter to YouNow, which put him on its playmate program, permitting him to earn money when his fans left digital tips and gifts.
YouNow launched back in September of 2012, but for its very first year and a half struggled to find traction. Then in May of last year it abruptly clicked, exploding from less than ten million monthly visitors to more than one hundred million in the span of just four months. More than 35,000 hours of live movie are now streamed on the service each day, and more than a million dollars in tips flow through its platform each month.
Live streaming is having its moment This growth is part of a broader boom in live streaming services. Meerkat emerged as a media and tech darling, lightly winning the war for attention at this year’s SXSW. It primarily piggybacked off of Twitter, but was quickly cut off, likely because Twitter has its own plans for a live streaming service built around a company it just acquired, Periscope. We’ve eventually hit a tipping point where live streaming makes sense, both as a killer feature on a platform like Twitter, but also as a standalone business like YouNow. So why now?
"The reason is the rise of iOS and Android," says Emmett Shear, the CEO of Twitch. He attempted and failed to launch a general purpose live streaming service with Justin.TV. Eventually he pivoted into gaming, a niche where being tied to a desktop computer made sense. But now the mobile market is mature enough for a sea switch. "Smartphones provide all the critical chunks for these fresh services. They take care of distribution through the app store, monetization through in-app purchases, incredible movie quality through cameras and microphones, and connectivity everywhere with LTE internet." The growth and ubiquity of social networks is also "creating an amplifier effect for good consumer products."
YouNow is run by founder and CEO Adi Sideman, who knows very well the long history of failed experiments with live streaming. "It is a fantasy that a lot of people have been thinking about for a long time," Sideman told me, calming at a conference table in his midtown Fresh York office. "It is a holy grail."
"It is a holy grail." In the 1990s Sideman studied art and technology in Fresh York. He was part of a group that believed everyone would soon be the starlet of their own reality television series, all broadcast on the web. That included the infamous Josh Harris, a dot-com millionaire who imploded for his live audience, chronicled in the documentary We Live in Public. "I was running a media technology agency for a while and attempting to shove this down the mouth of every client, but nobody desired it," Sideman says.
Watching a YouNow stream can be an tremendous practice. The comments on popular movies fly by far too quickly for the broadcaster to go after. Often you see streamers squinting to make out a username, attempting to reply in real time to the flood of compliments and questions. "It’s all about the addiction to real time feedback and the knots in the brain that it triggers," Sideman tells me.
Users pay for broadcaster attention Users can give digital gifts, essentially rams, like hearts, fistbumps, or beers. These cost coins, which you earn from spending time interacting on YouNow. Users can also give premium goods, which cost money to acquire. A ninety nine cent peak sometimes gets a broadcaster to smile, while more expensive offerings elicit a private shoutout, or more intimate reaction. The company won’t share what the revenue split is inbetween streamers and YouNow, telling only that broadcasters in the playmate program get "the lion’s share" of their tips. Of course, anyone getting premium goods outside the playmate program gets no cut.
Sideman determines to give me a live demo. He tunes in to the channel of a user named FlippinGinja, a red-headed teenage and fledgling gymnast who is lounging on his porch sway. "Guys, I’ve been drinking too much water," he tells his smartphone camera. With the press of a few buttons Sideman tips Ginja the equivalent of $Five, along with a message asking him to roll for Ben.
"Everybody comment in the talk. Ben this roll is dedicated to you, for being so awesome. Everybody say, ‘We love Ben’ in the talk." While the talk lights up with people chanting my name, Ginja dashes down his steps onto his front lawn, does an amazing corkscrew backflip, does it again for good measure, and then goes back to the porch, where he resumes bantering a mile a minute, skimming the comments like a pro, dispensing jokes, attention, and affection in just the right doses.
Despite myself, I feel a rush of excitement, the thrill of having another human perform just for me. "The broadcaster is not the only content creator in the room," says Sideman. "It’s truly a one to many practice that feels like one to one. That is the heart, the secret. Even payment, there is feedback on the screen, feedback from the broadcaster, feedback from the audience, it’s part of the showcase."
One of the interesting aspects of Meerkat’s success is how top down it has been. Before it had a sizable user base it blew up on Product Hunt, becoming an overnight darling of influencers in tech and media. Last week Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Al Roker, and Jimmy Fallon all took the service for a spin. Before it had even cracked into the top 1,000 apps in the iOS store, Meerkat was the subject of innumerable articles and had become one more arrow in the quiver for celebrities with well established private brands. Instead of a photo or movie of someone famous doing something fabulous, you get a livestream instead. But so far it doesn’t have its own community, or any everyman starlets.
YouNow is the finish opposite. It’s one of the top grossing social apps on iOS, but its most popular users are largely unknown teenagers. They aren’t broadcasting from titillating places or doing interesting things. A lot of what happens on YouNow feels like the PG-13 version of Cam Chicks, part confessional conversation, part vaudeville spectacle.
An undercurrent of teenage fervor and longing YouNow cautiously polices and blocks nakedness or sexual content. But the teenagers and tweens that top its charts are fully aware of their own hookup appeal. A pair of youthful brothers joke about turning viewers on before engaging in a fully clothed wrestling match that quickly turns shirtless. A doll lies in bed and leisurely applies her makeup while a stream of commenters, their powerful breathing palpable, repeatedly ask her age.
That’s not to say everything on YouNow is softcore teenage solipsism. There are slew of striving rappers, guitar players, and dancers. FlippinGinja’s father, after eyeing how much his son was earning, emailed asking if he too could become a paid content playmate. Dad broadcasts extended rants, often while driving, on the state of pop music, politics, his hyperactive son. FlippinDad now regularly pulls in a hundred or more viewer during broadcasts. "So now there is a 2nd camera in this reality demonstrate!" Sideman says with excitement.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality. The fascination of the audience seems less tethered to what the person is doing on screen, and more to the amount of time they are willing to spend in front of the camera, the level of proximity they are convenient cultivating. I spoke on the phone with Rudan, a 20-something Texan who dropped out of college, leaving behind a degree in computer science for total time broadcasting.
"The people who support us will see us do anything. There are times when I fall asleep on broadcast, and wake up, the stream has been going for ten or twelve hours and people are still watching, still commenting, still providing tips," says Rudan. The talk on his live flows is too busy for a real conversation, but fans engage fans in deeper conversation on Snapchat, and through text messages and phone calls. "They go after you wherever you go, they text you, they commence telling you their story. You become a role model, an inspiration."
While his live stream is typically an upbeat affair, total of jokes, horseplay and goofy voices, Rudan says the relationships with fans are often fairly serious. "People don’t seem to understand, broadcasting is very stressfull. The main audience is youthfull teenage women. The thickest topic of discussion is suicide and cutting. It gets pretty deep. When I very first embarked I got depressed." He sees himself as someone they can turn to for convenience and entertainment. "I don’t like to call it counselor, or therapist, but usually that’s what you do when you broadcast. You help people smile, keep them glad.
We’re all greedy for what we feel is a meaningful connection with our fellow humans. Modern technology is permitting that deep desire to play out in some very strange ways. I ask Sideman, YouNow’s CEO, what he makes of the content on the site he created. "It’s raw. If you look at our homepage, it’s very raw. There is nothing packaged about it. Eventually there will be. But it’s in that titillating stage. It reminds me of the early days of the internet," he says. It remains to be seen if live streaming will have more staying power in the mobile era than it did in the dot-com days.
As we talk Sideman tunes into the channel for Rudan. We catch him shirtless, cooking a meal, singing to himself, and working the talk room. "It’s nice to see people with real talent," he says, "And ‘What is talent?’ is also a excellent subjective question."
The live-streaming app where amateurs get paid to talk, eat, and sleep on camera, The Edge
The live-streaming app where amateurs get paid to talk, eat, and sleep on camera
Tayser Abuhamdeh doesn’t have what most people would call an titillating job. He works behind the counter at a deli in Brooklyn, a puny shop that does a brisk business in snacks, coffee, and cigarettes. In June of last year, on a fad and mostly out of boredom, Abuhamdeh mounted his phone next to the register and began to broadcast his day on YouNow, a live streaming service. His treat was Mr. Cashier.
“I was talking to myself at very first,” he says. “No one was there. But I was jumpy, I felt like there were people watching. I was quiet. It was weird.” After a few weeks of broadcasting he began to find his rhythm. “Eventually I began opening up, telling random things, telling jokes and laughing at my own jokes. I commenced to act like people were there watching, and that’s when they demonstrated up.”
Abuhamdeh’s routine was subtle. People would walk up and pay, he would ring them up, and then as they left, poke them with a zinger spoken to the camera. If a customer was in on the joke, Abuhamdeh would banter with them a bit. He collective stories from his home life, and leisurely began to invite fans into it, broadcasting from his apartment, from a cousin’s wedding, while driving in his car or getting a haircut.
His broadcasting schedule swelled from one or two hours a day to appearing live in four two-hour sessions. His fanbase grew, but so did his phone bill. “I was using up around 70GB of data each month, and I’m with Verizon so you know that’s not cheap.” He was addicted to the interaction with the audience, but couldn’t afford to keep up with his costs. So he sent a letter to YouNow, which put him on its playmate program, permitting him to earn money when his fans left digital tips and gifts.
YouNow launched back in September of 2012, but for its very first year and a half struggled to find traction. Then in May of last year it abruptly clicked, exploding from less than ten million monthly visitors to more than one hundred million in the span of just four months. More than 35,000 hours of live movie are now streamed on the service each day, and more than a million dollars in tips flow through its platform each month.
Live streaming is having its moment This growth is part of a broader boom in live streaming services. Meerkat emerged as a media and tech darling, lightly winning the war for attention at this year’s SXSW. It originally piggybacked off of Twitter, but was quickly cut off, likely because Twitter has its own plans for a live streaming service built around a company it just acquired, Periscope. We’ve ultimately hit a tipping point where live streaming makes sense, both as a killer feature on a platform like Twitter, but also as a standalone business like YouNow. So why now?
"The reason is the rise of iOS and Android," says Emmett Shear, the CEO of Twitch. He attempted and failed to launch a general purpose live streaming service with Justin.TV. Eventually he pivoted into gaming, a niche where being tied to a desktop computer made sense. But now the mobile market is mature enough for a sea switch. "Smartphones provide all the critical lumps for these fresh services. They take care of distribution through the app store, monetization through in-app purchases, incredible movie quality through cameras and microphones, and connectivity everywhere with LTE internet." The growth and ubiquity of social networks is also "creating an amplifier effect for good consumer products."
YouNow is run by founder and CEO Adi Sideman, who knows very well the long history of failed experiments with live streaming. "It is a fantasy that a lot of people have been thinking about for a long time," Sideman told me, loosening at a conference table in his midtown Fresh York office. "It is a holy grail."
"It is a holy grail." In the 1990s Sideman studied art and technology in Fresh York. He was part of a group that believed everyone would soon be the starlet of their own reality television series, all broadcast on the web. That included the infamous Josh Harris, a dot-com millionaire who imploded for his live audience, chronicled in the documentary We Live in Public. "I was running a media technology agency for a while and attempting to shove this down the mouth of every client, but nobody wished it," Sideman says.
Watching a YouNow stream can be an terrific practice. The comments on popular movies fly by far too quickly for the broadcaster to go after. Often you see streamers squinting to make out a username, attempting to reply in real time to the flood of compliments and questions. "It’s all about the addiction to real time feedback and the knots in the brain that it triggers," Sideman tells me.
Users pay for broadcaster attention Users can give digital gifts, essentially slams, like hearts, fistbumps, or beers. These cost coins, which you earn from spending time interacting on YouNow. Users can also give premium goods, which cost money to acquire. A ninety nine cent peak sometimes gets a broadcaster to smile, while more expensive offerings elicit a private shoutout, or more intimate reaction. The company won’t share what the revenue split is inbetween streamers and YouNow, telling only that broadcasters in the fucking partner program get "the lion’s share" of their tips. Of course, anyone getting premium goods outside the playmate program gets no cut.
Sideman determines to give me a live demo. He tunes in to the channel of a user named FlippinGinja, a red-headed teenage and fledgling gymnast who is lounging on his porch sway. "Guys, I’ve been drinking too much water," he tells his smartphone camera. With the press of a few buttons Sideman tips Ginja the equivalent of $Five, along with a message asking him to spin for Ben.
"Everybody comment in the talk. Ben this spin is dedicated to you, for being so awesome. Everybody say, ‘We love Ben’ in the talk." While the talk lights up with people chanting my name, Ginja dashes down his steps onto his front lawn, does an amazing corkscrew backflip, does it again for good measure, and then goes back to the porch, where he proceeds bantering a mile a minute, skimming the comments like a pro, dispensing jokes, attention, and affection in just the right doses.
Despite myself, I feel a rush of excitement, the thrill of having another human perform just for me. "The broadcaster is not the only content creator in the room," says Sideman. "It’s truly a one to many practice that feels like one to one. That is the heart, the secret. Even payment, there is feedback on the screen, feedback from the broadcaster, feedback from the audience, it’s part of the display."
One of the interesting aspects of Meerkat’s success is how top down it has been. Before it had a sizable user base it blew up on Product Hunt, becoming an overnight darling of influencers in tech and media. Last week Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Al Roker, and Jimmy Fallon all took the service for a spin. Before it had even cracked into the top 1,000 apps in the iOS store, Meerkat was the subject of uncountable articles and had become one more arrow in the quiver for celebrities with well established individual brands. Instead of a photo or movie of someone famous doing something fabulous, you get a livestream instead. But so far it doesn’t have its own community, or any everyman starlets.
YouNow is the finish opposite. It’s one of the top grossing social apps on iOS, but its most popular users are largely unknown teenagers. They aren’t broadcasting from arousing places or doing interesting things. A lot of what happens on YouNow feels like the PG-13 version of Cam Chicks, part confessional conversation, part vaudeville spectacle.
An undercurrent of teenage eagerness and longing YouNow cautiously polices and blocks bareness or sexual content. But the teenagers and tweens that top its charts are fully aware of their own lovemaking appeal. A pair of youthfull brothers joke about turning viewers on before engaging in a fully clothed wrestling match that quickly turns shirtless. A woman lies in bed and leisurely applies her makeup while a stream of commenters, their powerful breathing palpable, repeatedly ask her age.
That’s not to say everything on YouNow is softcore teenage solipsism. There are slew of striving rappers, guitar players, and dancers. FlippinGinja’s father, after eyeing how much his son was earning, emailed asking if he too could become a paid content playmate. Dad broadcasts extended rants, often while driving, on the state of pop music, politics, his hyperactive son. FlippinDad now regularly pulls in a hundred or more viewer during broadcasts. "So now there is a 2nd camera in this reality demonstrate!" Sideman says with excitement.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality. The fascination of the audience seems less tethered to what the person is doing on screen, and more to the amount of time they are willing to spend in front of the camera, the level of proximity they are convenient cultivating. I spoke on the phone with Rudan, a 20-something Texan who dropped out of college, leaving behind a degree in computer science for utter time broadcasting.
"The people who support us will witness us do anything. There are times when I fall asleep on broadcast, and wake up, the stream has been going for ten or twelve hours and people are still watching, still commenting, still providing tips," says Rudan. The talk on his live flows is too busy for a real conversation, but fans engage fans in deeper conversation on Snapchat, and through text messages and phone calls. "They go after you wherever you go, they text you, they commence telling you their story. You become a role model, an inspiration."
While his live stream is typically an upbeat affair, utter of jokes, horseplay and goofy voices, Rudan says the relationships with fans are often fairly serious. "People don’t seem to understand, broadcasting is very strained. The main audience is youthfull teenage women. The fattest topic of discussion is suicide and cutting. It gets pretty deep. When I very first began I got depressed." He sees himself as someone they can turn to for convenience and entertainment. "I don’t like to call it counselor, or therapist, but usually that’s what you do when you broadcast. You help people smile, keep them blessed.
We’re all thirsty for what we feel is a meaningful connection with our fellow humans. Modern technology is permitting that deep desire to play out in some very strange ways. I ask Sideman, YouNow’s CEO, what he makes of the content on the site he created. "It’s raw. If you look at our homepage, it’s very raw. There is nothing packaged about it. Eventually there will be. But it’s in that arousing stage. It reminds me of the early days of the internet," he says. It remains to be seen if live streaming will have more staying power in the mobile era than it did in the dot-com days.
As we talk Sideman tunes into the channel for Rudan. We catch him shirtless, cooking a meal, singing to himself, and working the talk room. "It’s nice to see people with real talent," he says, "And ‘What is talent?’ is also a superb subjective question."
The live-streaming app where amateurs get paid to talk, eat, and sleep on camera, The Brink
The live-streaming app where amateurs get paid to talk, eat, and sleep on camera
Tayser Abuhamdeh doesn’t have what most people would call an arousing job. He works behind the counter at a deli in Brooklyn, a petite shop that does a brisk business in snacks, coffee, and cigarettes. In June of last year, on a caprice and mostly out of boredom, Abuhamdeh mounted his phone next to the register and began to broadcast his day on YouNow, a live streaming service. His treat was Mr. Cashier.
“I was talking to myself at very first,” he says. “No one was there. But I was jumpy, I felt like there were people watching. I was quiet. It was weird.” After a few weeks of broadcasting he began to find his rhythm. “Eventually I commenced opening up, telling random things, telling jokes and laughing at my own jokes. I began to act like people were there watching, and that’s when they displayed up.”
Abuhamdeh’s routine was subtle. People would walk up and pay, he would ring them up, and then as they left, tear up them with a zinger spoken to the camera. If a customer was in on the joke, Abuhamdeh would banter with them a bit. He collective stories from his home life, and leisurely began to invite fans into it, broadcasting from his apartment, from a cousin’s wedding, while driving in his car or getting a haircut.
His broadcasting schedule swelled from one or two hours a day to appearing live in four two-hour sessions. His fanbase grew, but so did his phone bill. “I was using up around 70GB of data each month, and I’m with Verizon so you know that’s not cheap.” He was addicted to the interaction with the audience, but couldn’t afford to keep up with his costs. So he sent a letter to YouNow, which put him on its fucking partner program, permitting him to earn money when his fans left digital tips and gifts.
YouNow launched back in September of 2012, but for its very first year and a half struggled to find traction. Then in May of last year it all of a sudden clicked, exploding from less than ten million monthly visitors to more than one hundred million in the span of just four months. More than 35,000 hours of live movie are now streamed on the service each day, and more than a million dollars in tips flow through its platform each month.
Live streaming is having its moment This growth is part of a broader boom in live streaming services. Meerkat emerged as a media and tech darling, lightly winning the war for attention at this year’s SXSW. It primarily piggybacked off of Twitter, but was quickly cut off, likely because Twitter has its own plans for a live streaming service built around a company it just acquired, Periscope. We’ve eventually hit a tipping point where live streaming makes sense, both as a killer feature on a platform like Twitter, but also as a standalone business like YouNow. So why now?
"The reason is the rise of iOS and Android," says Emmett Shear, the CEO of Twitch. He attempted and failed to launch a general purpose live streaming service with Justin.TV. Eventually he pivoted into gaming, a niche where being tied to a desktop computer made sense. But now the mobile market is mature enough for a sea switch. "Smartphones provide all the critical chunks for these fresh services. They take care of distribution through the app store, monetization through in-app purchases, incredible movie quality through cameras and microphones, and connectivity everywhere with LTE internet." The growth and ubiquity of social networks is also "creating an amplifier effect for good consumer products."
YouNow is run by founder and CEO Adi Sideman, who knows very well the long history of failed experiments with live streaming. "It is a desire that a lot of people have been thinking about for a long time," Sideman told me, loosening at a conference table in his midtown Fresh York office. "It is a holy grail."
"It is a holy grail." In the 1990s Sideman studied art and technology in Fresh York. He was part of a group that believed everyone would soon be the starlet of their own reality television series, all broadcast on the web. That included the infamous Josh Harris, a dot-com millionaire who imploded for his live audience, chronicled in the documentary We Live in Public. "I was running a media technology agency for a while and attempting to shove this down the mouth of every client, but nobody desired it," Sideman says.
Watching a YouNow stream can be an tremendous practice. The comments on popular movies fly by far too quickly for the broadcaster to go after. Often you see streamers squinting to make out a username, attempting to reply in real time to the flood of compliments and questions. "It’s all about the addiction to real time feedback and the knots in the brain that it triggers," Sideman tells me.
Users pay for broadcaster attention Users can give digital gifts, essentially jams, like hearts, fistbumps, or beers. These cost coins, which you earn from spending time interacting on YouNow. Users can also give premium goods, which cost money to acquire. A ninety nine cent peak sometimes gets a broadcaster to smile, while more expensive offerings elicit a private shoutout, or more intimate reaction. The company won’t share what the revenue split is inbetween streamers and YouNow, telling only that broadcasters in the playmate program get "the lion’s share" of their tips. Of course, anyone getting premium goods outside the playmate program gets no cut.
Sideman determines to give me a live demo. He tunes in to the channel of a user named FlippinGinja, a red-headed teenage and fledgling gymnast who is lounging on his porch sway. "Guys, I’ve been drinking too much water," he tells his smartphone camera. With the press of a few buttons Sideman tips Ginja the equivalent of $Five, along with a message asking him to spin for Ben.
"Everybody comment in the talk. Ben this spin is dedicated to you, for being so awesome. Everybody say, ‘We love Ben’ in the talk." While the talk lights up with people chanting my name, Ginja dashes down his steps onto his front lawn, does an amazing corkscrew backflip, does it again for good measure, and then goes back to the porch, where he resumes bantering a mile a minute, skimming the comments like a pro, dispensing jokes, attention, and affection in just the right doses.
Despite myself, I feel a rush of excitement, the thrill of having another human perform just for me. "The broadcaster is not the only content creator in the room," says Sideman. "It’s indeed a one to many practice that feels like one to one. That is the heart, the secret. Even payment, there is feedback on the screen, feedback from the broadcaster, feedback from the audience, it’s part of the demonstrate."
One of the interesting aspects of Meerkat’s success is how top down it has been. Before it had a sizable user base it blew up on Product Hunt, becoming an overnight darling of influencers in tech and media. Last week Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Al Roker, and Jimmy Fallon all took the service for a spin. Before it had even cracked into the top 1,000 apps in the iOS store, Meerkat was the subject of uncountable articles and had become one more arrow in the quiver for celebrities with well established private brands. Instead of a photo or movie of someone famous doing something fabulous, you get a livestream instead. But so far it doesn’t have its own community, or any everyman starlets.
YouNow is the accomplish opposite. It’s one of the top grossing social apps on iOS, but its most popular users are largely unknown teenagers. They aren’t broadcasting from arousing places or doing interesting things. A lot of what happens on YouNow feels like the PG-13 version of Cam Women, part confessional conversation, part vaudeville spectacle.
An undercurrent of teenage passion and longing YouNow cautiously polices and blocks nakedness or sexual content. But the teenagers and tweens that top its charts are fully aware of their own hook-up appeal. A pair of youthful brothers joke about turning viewers on before engaging in a fully clothed wrestling match that quickly turns shirtless. A doll lies in bed and leisurely applies her makeup while a stream of commenters, their strenuous breathing palpable, repeatedly ask her age.
That’s not to say everything on YouNow is softcore teenage solipsism. There are slew of striving rappers, guitar players, and dancers. FlippinGinja’s father, after witnessing how much his son was earning, emailed asking if he too could become a paid content playmate. Dad broadcasts extended rants, often while driving, on the state of pop music, politics, his hyperactive son. FlippinDad now regularly pulls in a hundred or more viewer during broadcasts. "So now there is a 2nd camera in this reality display!" Sideman says with excitement.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality. The fascination of the audience seems less tethered to what the person is doing on screen, and more to the amount of time they are willing to spend in front of the camera, the level of intimity they are convenient cultivating. I spoke on the phone with Rudan, a 20-something Texan who dropped out of college, leaving behind a degree in computer science for total time broadcasting.
"The people who support us will witness us do anything. There are times when I fall asleep on broadcast, and wake up, the stream has been going for ten or twelve hours and people are still watching, still commenting, still providing tips," says Rudan. The talk on his live flows is too busy for a real conversation, but fans engage fans in deeper conversation on Snapchat, and through text messages and phone calls. "They go after you wherever you go, they text you, they begin telling you their story. You become a role model, an inspiration."
While his live stream is typically an upbeat affair, total of jokes, horseplay and goofy voices, Rudan says the relationships with fans are often fairly serious. "People don’t seem to understand, broadcasting is very stressfull. The main audience is youthfull teenage damsels. The largest topic of discussion is suicide and cutting. It gets pretty deep. When I very first embarked I got depressed." He sees himself as someone they can turn to for convenience and entertainment. "I don’t like to call it counselor, or therapist, but usually that’s what you do when you broadcast. You help people smile, keep them blessed.
We’re all thirsty for what we feel is a meaningful connection with our fellow humans. Modern technology is permitting that deep desire to play out in some very strange ways. I ask Sideman, YouNow’s CEO, what he makes of the content on the site he created. "It’s raw. If you look at our homepage, it’s very raw. There is nothing packaged about it. Eventually there will be. But it’s in that arousing stage. It reminds me of the early days of the internet," he says. It remains to be seen if live streaming will have more staying power in the mobile era than it did in the dot-com days.
As we talk Sideman tunes into the channel for Rudan. We catch him shirtless, cooking a meal, singing to himself, and working the talk room. "It’s nice to see people with real talent," he says, "And ‘What is talent?’ is also a superb subjective question."
The live-streaming app where amateurs get paid to talk, eat, and sleep on camera, The Brink
The live-streaming app where amateurs get paid to talk, eat, and sleep on camera
Tayser Abuhamdeh doesn’t have what most people would call an titillating job. He works behind the counter at a deli in Brooklyn, a puny shop that does a brisk business in snacks, coffee, and cigarettes. In June of last year, on a caprice and mostly out of boredom, Abuhamdeh mounted his phone next to the register and began to broadcast his day on YouNow, a live streaming service. His treat was Mr. Cashier.
“I was talking to myself at very first,” he says. “No one was there. But I was jumpy, I felt like there were people watching. I was quiet. It was weird.” After a few weeks of broadcasting he began to find his rhythm. “Eventually I began opening up, telling random things, telling jokes and laughing at my own jokes. I began to act like people were there watching, and that’s when they showcased up.”
Abuhamdeh’s routine was subtle. People would walk up and pay, he would ring them up, and then as they left, tear up them with a zinger spoken to the camera. If a customer was in on the joke, Abuhamdeh would banter with them a bit. He collective stories from his home life, and leisurely began to invite fans into it, broadcasting from his apartment, from a cousin’s wedding, while driving in his car or getting a haircut.
His broadcasting schedule swelled from one or two hours a day to appearing live in four two-hour sessions. His fanbase grew, but so did his phone bill. “I was using up around 70GB of data each month, and I’m with Verizon so you know that’s not cheap.” He was addicted to the interaction with the audience, but couldn’t afford to keep up with his costs. So he sent a letter to YouNow, which put him on its fucking partner program, permitting him to earn money when his fans left digital tips and gifts.
YouNow launched back in September of 2012, but for its very first year and a half struggled to find traction. Then in May of last year it all of a sudden clicked, exploding from less than ten million monthly visitors to more than one hundred million in the span of just four months. More than 35,000 hours of live movie are now streamed on the service each day, and more than a million dollars in tips flow through its platform each month.
Live streaming is having its moment This growth is part of a broader boom in live streaming services. Meerkat emerged as a media and tech darling, lightly winning the war for attention at this year’s SXSW. It primarily piggybacked off of Twitter, but was quickly cut off, likely because Twitter has its own plans for a live streaming service built around a company it just acquired, Periscope. We’ve eventually hit a tipping point where live streaming makes sense, both as a killer feature on a platform like Twitter, but also as a standalone business like YouNow. So why now?
"The reason is the rise of iOS and Android," says Emmett Shear, the CEO of Twitch. He attempted and failed to launch a general purpose live streaming service with Justin.TV. Eventually he pivoted into gaming, a niche where being tied to a desktop computer made sense. But now the mobile market is mature enough for a sea switch. "Smartphones provide all the critical chunks for these fresh services. They take care of distribution through the app store, monetization through in-app purchases, incredible movie quality through cameras and microphones, and connectivity everywhere with LTE internet." The growth and ubiquity of social networks is also "creating an amplifier effect for good consumer products."
YouNow is run by founder and CEO Adi Sideman, who knows very well the long history of failed experiments with live streaming. "It is a desire that a lot of people have been thinking about for a long time," Sideman told me, calming at a conference table in his midtown Fresh York office. "It is a holy grail."
"It is a holy grail." In the 1990s Sideman studied art and technology in Fresh York. He was part of a group that believed everyone would soon be the starlet of their own reality television series, all broadcast on the web. That included the infamous Josh Harris, a dot-com millionaire who imploded for his live audience, chronicled in the documentary We Live in Public. "I was running a media technology agency for a while and attempting to shove this down the mouth of every client, but nobody dreamed it," Sideman says.
Watching a YouNow stream can be an breathtaking practice. The comments on popular movies fly by far too quickly for the broadcaster to go after. Often you see streamers squinting to make out a username, attempting to reply in real time to the flood of compliments and questions. "It’s all about the addiction to real time feedback and the knots in the brain that it triggers," Sideman tells me.
Users pay for broadcaster attention Users can give digital gifts, essentially plunges, like hearts, fistbumps, or beers. These cost coins, which you earn from spending time interacting on YouNow. Users can also give premium goods, which cost money to acquire. A ninety nine cent peak sometimes gets a broadcaster to smile, while more expensive offerings elicit a individual shoutout, or more intimate reaction. The company won’t share what the revenue split is inbetween streamers and YouNow, telling only that broadcasters in the fucking partner program get "the lion’s share" of their tips. Of course, anyone getting premium goods outside the playmate program gets no cut.
Sideman determines to give me a live demo. He tunes in to the channel of a user named FlippinGinja, a red-headed teenage and fledgling gymnast who is lounging on his porch sway. "Guys, I’ve been drinking too much water," he tells his smartphone camera. With the press of a few buttons Sideman tips Ginja the equivalent of $Five, along with a message asking him to spin for Ben.
"Everybody comment in the talk. Ben this spin is dedicated to you, for being so awesome. Everybody say, ‘We love Ben’ in the talk." While the talk lights up with people chanting my name, Ginja dashes down his steps onto his front lawn, does an amazing corkscrew backflip, does it again for good measure, and then goes back to the porch, where he proceeds bantering a mile a minute, skimming the comments like a pro, dispensing jokes, attention, and affection in just the right doses.
Despite myself, I feel a rush of excitement, the thrill of having another human perform just for me. "The broadcaster is not the only content creator in the room," says Sideman. "It’s truly a one to many practice that feels like one to one. That is the heart, the secret. Even payment, there is feedback on the screen, feedback from the broadcaster, feedback from the audience, it’s part of the showcase."
One of the interesting aspects of Meerkat’s success is how top down it has been. Before it had a sizable user base it blew up on Product Hunt, becoming an overnight darling of influencers in tech and media. Last week Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Al Roker, and Jimmy Fallon all took the service for a spin. Before it had even cracked into the top 1,000 apps in the iOS store, Meerkat was the subject of uncountable articles and had become one more arrow in the quiver for celebrities with well established individual brands. Instead of a photo or movie of someone famous doing something fabulous, you get a livestream instead. But so far it doesn’t have its own community, or any everyman starlets.
YouNow is the accomplish opposite. It’s one of the top grossing social apps on iOS, but its most popular users are largely unknown teenagers. They aren’t broadcasting from arousing places or doing interesting things. A lot of what happens on YouNow feels like the PG-13 version of Cam Ladies, part confessional conversation, part vaudeville spectacle.
An undercurrent of teenage passion and longing YouNow cautiously polices and blocks bareness or sexual content. But the teenagers and tweens that top its charts are fully aware of their own hook-up appeal. A pair of youthful brothers joke about turning viewers on before engaging in a fully clothed wrestling match that quickly turns shirtless. A woman lies in bed and leisurely applies her makeup while a stream of commenters, their strenuous breathing palpable, repeatedly ask her age.
That’s not to say everything on YouNow is softcore teenage solipsism. There are slew of striving rappers, guitar players, and dancers. FlippinGinja’s father, after watching how much his son was earning, emailed asking if he too could become a paid content playmate. Dad broadcasts extended rants, often while driving, on the state of pop music, politics, his hyperactive son. FlippinDad now regularly pulls in a hundred or more viewer during broadcasts. "So now there is a 2nd camera in this reality display!" Sideman says with excitement.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality. The fascination of the audience seems less tethered to what the person is doing on screen, and more to the amount of time they are willing to spend in front of the camera, the level of proximity they are convenient cultivating. I spoke on the phone with Rudan, a 20-something Texan who dropped out of college, leaving behind a degree in computer science for total time broadcasting.
"The people who support us will witness us do anything. There are times when I fall asleep on broadcast, and wake up, the stream has been going for ten or twelve hours and people are still watching, still commenting, still providing tips," says Rudan. The talk on his live rivulets is too busy for a real conversation, but fans engage fans in deeper conversation on Snapchat, and through text messages and phone calls. "They go after you wherever you go, they text you, they begin telling you their story. You become a role model, an inspiration."
While his live stream is typically an upbeat affair, utter of jokes, horseplay and goofy voices, Rudan says the relationships with fans are often fairly serious. "People don’t seem to understand, broadcasting is very strained. The main audience is youthful teenage ladies. The largest topic of discussion is suicide and cutting. It gets pretty deep. When I very first embarked I got depressed." He sees himself as someone they can turn to for convenience and entertainment. "I don’t like to call it counselor, or therapist, but usually that’s what you do when you broadcast. You help people smile, keep them blessed.
We’re all thirsty for what we feel is a meaningful connection with our fellow humans. Modern technology is permitting that deep desire to play out in some very strange ways. I ask Sideman, YouNow’s CEO, what he makes of the content on the site he created. "It’s raw. If you look at our homepage, it’s very raw. There is nothing packaged about it. Eventually there will be. But it’s in that titillating stage. It reminds me of the early days of the internet," he says. It remains to be seen if live streaming will have more staying power in the mobile era than it did in the dot-com days.
As we talk Sideman tunes into the channel for Rudan. We catch him shirtless, cooking a meal, singing to himself, and working the talk room. "It’s nice to see people with real talent," he says, "And ‘What is talent?’ is also a good subjective question."
The live-streaming app where amateurs get paid to talk, eat, and sleep on camera, The Edge
The live-streaming app where amateurs get paid to talk, eat, and sleep on camera
Tayser Abuhamdeh doesn’t have what most people would call an titillating job. He works behind the counter at a deli in Brooklyn, a puny shop that does a brisk business in snacks, coffee, and cigarettes. In June of last year, on a caprice and mostly out of boredom, Abuhamdeh mounted his phone next to the register and began to broadcast his day on YouNow, a live streaming service. His treat was Mr. Cashier.
“I was talking to myself at very first,” he says. “No one was there. But I was jumpy, I felt like there were people watching. I was quiet. It was weird.” After a few weeks of broadcasting he began to find his rhythm. “Eventually I began opening up, telling random things, telling jokes and laughing at my own jokes. I embarked to act like people were there watching, and that’s when they demonstrated up.”
Abuhamdeh’s routine was subtle. People would walk up and pay, he would ring them up, and then as they left, screw them with a zinger spoken to the camera. If a customer was in on the joke, Abuhamdeh would banter with them a bit. He collective stories from his home life, and leisurely began to invite fans into it, broadcasting from his apartment, from a cousin’s wedding, while driving in his car or getting a haircut.
His broadcasting schedule swelled from one or two hours a day to appearing live in four two-hour sessions. His fanbase grew, but so did his phone bill. “I was using up around 70GB of data each month, and I’m with Verizon so you know that’s not cheap.” He was addicted to the interaction with the audience, but couldn’t afford to keep up with his costs. So he sent a letter to YouNow, which put him on its fucking partner program, permitting him to earn money when his fans left digital tips and gifts.
YouNow launched back in September of 2012, but for its very first year and a half struggled to find traction. Then in May of last year it abruptly clicked, exploding from less than ten million monthly visitors to more than one hundred million in the span of just four months. More than 35,000 hours of live movie are now streamed on the service each day, and more than a million dollars in tips flow through its platform each month.
Live streaming is having its moment This growth is part of a broader boom in live streaming services. Meerkat emerged as a media and tech darling, lightly winning the war for attention at this year’s SXSW. It primarily piggybacked off of Twitter, but was quickly cut off, likely because Twitter has its own plans for a live streaming service built around a company it just acquired, Periscope. We’ve ultimately hit a tipping point where live streaming makes sense, both as a killer feature on a platform like Twitter, but also as a standalone business like YouNow. So why now?
"The reason is the rise of iOS and Android," says Emmett Shear, the CEO of Twitch. He attempted and failed to launch a general purpose live streaming service with Justin.TV. Eventually he pivoted into gaming, a niche where being tied to a desktop computer made sense. But now the mobile market is mature enough for a sea switch. "Smartphones provide all the critical lumps for these fresh services. They take care of distribution through the app store, monetization through in-app purchases, incredible movie quality through cameras and microphones, and connectivity everywhere with LTE internet." The growth and ubiquity of social networks is also "creating an amplifier effect for good consumer products."
YouNow is run by founder and CEO Adi Sideman, who knows very well the long history of failed experiments with live streaming. "It is a desire that a lot of people have been thinking about for a long time," Sideman told me, relieving at a conference table in his midtown Fresh York office. "It is a holy grail."
"It is a holy grail." In the 1990s Sideman studied art and technology in Fresh York. He was part of a group that believed everyone would soon be the starlet of their own reality television series, all broadcast on the web. That included the infamous Josh Harris, a dot-com millionaire who imploded for his live audience, chronicled in the documentary We Live in Public. "I was running a media technology agency for a while and attempting to shove this down the mouth of every client, but nobody dreamed it," Sideman says.
Watching a YouNow stream can be an terrific practice. The comments on popular movies fly by far too quickly for the broadcaster to go after. Often you see streamers squinting to make out a username, attempting to reply in real time to the flood of compliments and questions. "It’s all about the addiction to real time feedback and the knots in the brain that it triggers," Sideman tells me.
Users pay for broadcaster attention Users can give digital gifts, essentially rams, like hearts, fistbumps, or beers. These cost coins, which you earn from spending time interacting on YouNow. Users can also give premium goods, which cost money to acquire. A ninety nine cent peak sometimes gets a broadcaster to smile, while more expensive offerings elicit a private shoutout, or more intimate reaction. The company won’t share what the revenue split is inbetween streamers and YouNow, telling only that broadcasters in the fucking partner program get "the lion’s share" of their tips. Of course, anyone getting premium goods outside the playmate program gets no cut.
Sideman determines to give me a live demo. He tunes in to the channel of a user named FlippinGinja, a red-headed teenage and inexperienced gymnast who is lounging on his porch sway. "Guys, I’ve been drinking too much water," he tells his smartphone camera. With the press of a few buttons Sideman tips Ginja the equivalent of $Five, along with a message asking him to roll for Ben.
"Everybody comment in the talk. Ben this spin is dedicated to you, for being so awesome. Everybody say, ‘We love Ben’ in the talk." While the talk lights up with people chanting my name, Ginja dashes down his steps onto his front lawn, does an amazing corkscrew backflip, does it again for good measure, and then goes back to the porch, where he resumes bantering a mile a minute, skimming the comments like a pro, dispensing jokes, attention, and affection in just the right doses.
Despite myself, I feel a rush of excitement, the thrill of having another human perform just for me. "The broadcaster is not the only content creator in the room," says Sideman. "It’s indeed a one to many practice that feels like one to one. That is the heart, the secret. Even payment, there is feedback on the screen, feedback from the broadcaster, feedback from the audience, it’s part of the demonstrate."
One of the interesting aspects of Meerkat’s success is how top down it has been. Before it had a sizable user base it blew up on Product Hunt, becoming an overnight darling of influencers in tech and media. Last week Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Al Roker, and Jimmy Fallon all took the service for a spin. Before it had even cracked into the top 1,000 apps in the iOS store, Meerkat was the subject of innumerable articles and had become one more arrow in the quiver for celebrities with well established private brands. Instead of a photo or movie of someone famous doing something fabulous, you get a livestream instead. But so far it doesn’t have its own community, or any everyman starlets.
YouNow is the accomplish opposite. It’s one of the top grossing social apps on iOS, but its most popular users are largely unknown teenagers. They aren’t broadcasting from titillating places or doing interesting things. A lot of what happens on YouNow feels like the PG-13 version of Cam Damsels, part confessional conversation, part vaudeville spectacle.
An undercurrent of teenage eagerness and longing YouNow cautiously polices and blocks nakedness or sexual content. But the teenagers and tweens that top its charts are fully aware of their own lovemaking appeal. A pair of youthfull brothers joke about turning viewers on before engaging in a fully clothed wrestling match that quickly turns shirtless. A doll lies in bed and leisurely applies her makeup while a stream of commenters, their strong breathing palpable, repeatedly ask her age.
That’s not to say everything on YouNow is softcore teenage solipsism. There are slew of striving rappers, guitar players, and dancers. FlippinGinja’s father, after watching how much his son was earning, emailed asking if he too could become a paid content fucking partner. Dad broadcasts extended rants, often while driving, on the state of pop music, politics, his hyperactive son. FlippinDad now regularly pulls in a hundred or more viewer during broadcasts. "So now there is a 2nd camera in this reality display!" Sideman says with excitement.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality.
There is talent on YouNow, but an equal amount of banality. The fascination of the audience seems less tethered to what the person is doing on screen, and more to the amount of time they are willing to spend in front of the camera, the level of proximity they are convenient cultivating. I spoke on the phone with Rudan, a 20-something Texan who dropped out of college, leaving behind a degree in computer science for total time broadcasting.
"The people who support us will observe us do anything. There are times when I fall asleep on broadcast, and wake up, the stream has been going for ten or twelve hours and people are still watching, still commenting, still providing tips," says Rudan. The talk on his live rivulets is too busy for a real conversation, but fans engage fans in deeper conversation on Snapchat, and through text messages and phone calls. "They go after you wherever you go, they text you, they embark telling you their story. You become a role model, an inspiration."
While his live stream is typically an upbeat affair, utter of jokes, horseplay and goofy voices, Rudan says the relationships with fans are often fairly serious. "People don’t seem to understand, broadcasting is very tense. The main audience is youthful teenage chicks. The largest topic of discussion is suicide and cutting. It gets pretty deep. When I very first began I got depressed." He sees himself as someone they can turn to for convenience and entertainment. "I don’t like to call it counselor, or therapist, but usually that’s what you do when you broadcast. You help people smile, keep them glad.
We’re all thirsty for what we feel is a meaningful connection with our fellow humans. Modern technology is permitting that deep desire to play out in some very strange ways. I ask Sideman, YouNow’s CEO, what he makes of the content on the site he created. "It’s raw. If you look at our homepage, it’s very raw. There is nothing packaged about it. Eventually there will be. But it’s in that titillating stage. It reminds me of the early days of the internet," he says. It remains to be seen if live streaming will have more staying power in the mobile era than it did in the dot-com days.
As we talk Sideman tunes into the channel for Rudan. We catch him shirtless, cooking a meal, singing to himself, and working the talk room. "It’s nice to see people with real talent," he says, "And ‘What is talent?’ is also a good subjective question."