Privacy as a social media model
Can a free social media site that doesn’t use your data for advertising work? Saudi billionaire Ayman Hariri is betting on yes.
His social media startup Vero launched in 2015 but gained in popularity last year after Instagram and Facebook started facing privacy and other issues.
Hariri, the son of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, received a computer science degree from Georgetown and returned to Saudi Arabia after his father was assassinated in 2005. In 2013 he left his family business to focus on starting up Vero.
You’re ad free. Do you plan on charging subscriptions?
We’re not charging yet [but] we’re behaving as a subscription company. Everything related to users’ data — their behavior, insight about them, where they are, who they are, what their habits are — we stay away from. We don’t know anything about our users that would allow us to gain insight into their behavior.
And so the initial users that subscribe today get Vero free for life. Once we start charging subscriptions, those new users will be charged on a yearly basis. Our target is to charge them what feels like a couple of cups of coffee a year.
We're not asking people to make a decision based on means, but a decision based on what they believe in. And do they believe that their privacy is worth what we ask for.
How do you see Vero fitting into the overall social media landscape?
We really think that the sort of data mining model and all of this current economy that’s built off of ads and free ... that’s not really free. People are understanding the cost of free really isn’t sustainable over a long period of time. I don’t see that working over a long period of time because the amount of insight that they need to gain on users is way too much and it’s way too pervasive.
How many people are on the site now?
We have about 5 million users today. Today, I’m the one funding the company in its entirety and will continue to do so because I really believe in this idea. And I think the world really needs to have an alternative. It’s about turning on subscriptions, having a few million users that make us profitable and then building from there.
How do you deal with extremist content or disinformation?
We ask our users to provide a phone number so we can verify that the person is real. It also is a great way to sort of discourage people who think that they can come on board anonymously and do whatever they want. When we add subscriptions, that’s going to add even more reason why they wouldn't want to come on board because to have a subscription you can’t be anonymous and pay.