Dear Studio Fam,
Facebook, Instagram, X, Snapchat, Discord…there is no shortage of massive social networking apps, yet investors continue to fund new ones. This week we take a look across the social networking landscape at new entrants, new features, new scale, and new failure. Our first two stories focus on social media apps designed for GenZ and college students. We also take a look at Threads a year after its launch, and examine an Indian social media app that failed to get traction.
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Colorful Customizations Make noplace Number One
Social media app noplace hit number one in the US App Store after leaving invite-only mode, attracting the GenZ crowd with simple, colorful profiles reminiscent of the early days of MySpace. The noplace app has many of the same features of Twitter or Facebook – users can post text updates, list their relationship status, or group their profiles into communities – but cannot post pictures or videos. “Social media doesn’t feel social anymore,” said CEO Tiffany Zhong. “Everything is just media. It feels very disconnected.”
GenZ Social App Fizz Launches Marketplace
Fizz launched its anonymous social networking app at Stanford University in 2022, expanding to hundreds of colleges with separate digital communities for each campus. The startup is now looking to leverage those network effects with its first marketplace features, letting students post items to sell to other students. There are no payment features yet, but this didn’t stop more than 50,000 transactions from occurring in the first week.
Threads Hits 175M Monthly Active Users
Despite the traction of apps like noplace and Fizz, traditional social networking sites aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Meta’s Twitter-close Threads is no exception, having hit over 175 million monthly active users one year after its launch. By comparison, Elon Musk recently claimed that Twitter/X has over 600 million monthly active users, but failed to be specific about whether this number includes only verified users.
Indian Twitter Clone Koo Shuts Down
The Indian social networking app Koo, which raised more than $60 million from investors like Tiger Global, has failed. Koo sought success in the Indian market by supporting over a dozen local languages and capitalizing on conflicts between foreign social media companies and the Indian government. India has stricter content moderation laws than most Western countries, and companies like Twitter have chafed against the Indian government’s censorship policies. However Koo’s domestic edge failed to translate to revenue, and a last minute attempt to merge with publishing platform DailyHunt was unsuccessful.