YouNow is the weirdest, most fascinating video streaming site. You can pay a teen while he sings, dances, or even sleeps.
YouNow
Lately, I've been enjoying a deeply creepy yet technically totally innocent new activity: lying in bed at night and watching random teens sleep. I've been doing it on YouNow, a mobile app and web live-streaming app that's a hit with teens. On its popular #sleepingsquad hashtag, I can see about 20 sleeping teens at any given time. (It usually seems around 50-plus people are broadcasting in the hashtag, but a lot of them are in complete darkness, so you can't actually see anything. Because, you know, they're sleeping.)
Some teens sleep with light music on. Some are completely silent. And some, eerily, have the distinctive soft breathing sounds of sleep.
I don't know exactly why a teen would broadcast themselves sleeping. I can't ask them.
Because they're asleep.
I have asked other teens (or younger — I talked with kids as young as 10) why they use YouNow, a real-time video broadcasting app. The problem with asking a 13-year-old why they do anything is that it's quite difficult to get anything past "I dunno/I'm bored." But that's also the wrong question to ask. Why climb Mount Everest? Why tweet? Do adults really ever have a better answer than "I was bored" for anything we do? The aching desire to cut through the tedium of daily life with human interaction is the driving force of everything on the internet. In fact, boredom is such an integral raison d'être of teen life that #bored is one of the top channels on YouNow.
I chatted the the other people watching in the #sleepingsquad: Why? One girl watching a sleeping teen boy with me gave a reasonable response: "He's my boyfriend." Others had elliptical reasoning: "I think it's more that the people doing it want to get likes and fans."
Adi Sideman, the founder of YouNow, told me his theory on #sleepingsquad: "It's the addiction to the internet, it's the addiction to social media, it's not wanting to leave it behind even when you're sleeping." Andy Weissman of Union Square Ventures, who is invested in the app, described it as "an online slumber party" in an email to BuzzFeed News. "I also think part of the human condition is to look for connection with others. And this is probably more acute with younger people."
The app is sort of like Vine meets Chat Roulette meets The Gong Show. You can watch people live-streaming in different channels like "Musicians," "Dancing," or "Girls" and chat feedback or questions to them. If you really like them, you can tip them with points purchased with real money through the app, and the performer gets real money as a tip. YouNow's revenue model is based completely around the tipping system; they take a cut of the in-app purchases when fans buy points to tip the performers.
It's basically like an open-mic night where the hat is passed around: Some people will watch for free, some will toss a dollar in, and the house takes a cut at the end of the night. Currently, there are no plans to introduce ads. "We're happy with our current revenue model," said Sideman.
Fandom doesn't have a price on other platforms, like Vine or YouTube, where teen stars are made — ad-supported videos eliminate the need for financial transactions between the watchers and the watched. I asked Sideman why these mostly young users (70% are under 24, according to Sideman) would actually pony up cash to enjoy someone playing an Ed Sheeran cover instead of just enjoying an Ed Sheeran cover for free.
"Most of the fans just enjoy and chat and interact. Some of the fans want to stand out and want to participate more in, really, the content creation," said Sideman. "Because think about it — from a theoretical standpoint this thing is as much about the audience as it is about the broadcast. And that's really our focus — to let everybody participate and create content together. So if I tip or if I send a message and he incorporates it into what he's doing, we're collaborating."
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