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There has been a growing movement away from social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter recently.
Users are getting fed up with relentless privacy violations, surveillance capitalism, political bias, targeting, and newsfeed manipulation by these companies.
And other social media platforms are benefitting from this tidal wave. Los Angeles-based social media network MeWe, touted to be the ad-free future of social networking, is currently the No. 1 downloaded social app in the Google Play Store, and the No. 3 downloaded app out of all apps in the store.
The privacy-first “anti-Facebook” platform added 2.5 million new members in the last week.
Since launching in 2016, it surged to nine million users in October 2020, doubling its membership during each of the last three years.
The platform is currently sitting at 15.5 million members — 50% of whom are outside of North America.
MeWe is now translated into 20 languages and is currently the No. 1 social app in Hong Kong.
The company says that its membership spikes frequently — as people worldwide seek a social network that respects them as customers to be delighted, not with ‘data to share, target, or sell”.
MeWe claims to be the new mainstream social network with the features people love and no ads, no targeting, and no newsfeed manipulation.
MeWe is the most downloaded social app and No. 3 in the list of most downloaded apps as of Jan. 15, 2021.
It was knocked off the top slot by WhatsApp alternatives Signal and Telegram, which are benefitting from the brouhaha over WhatsApp’s data privacy changes.
Users are becoming disillusioned by the data gathering from platforms such as Facebook. MeWe gives users total control over their data along with privacy no ads, no targeting, no facial recognition, no data mining, and no newsfeed manipulation.
The main feed can become a little overwhelming at times, but you quickly learn to focus on the information you want to see.
I think that the platform will continue to grow as more and more users come to enjoy the freedom of the feed, and the ad-free look and feel.
MeWe Premium subscriptions will also enjoy steady growth across 2021 and its business pages ($1.99 per month) will be able to compete effectively in a decidedly un-crowded marketplace.
MeWe’s challenge will certainly be keeping up with the hardware needed to scale the platform to cope with this explosion of growth.
Hopefully, its investors have planned for this, and there is plenty of headroom to cope with the tidal flow of new users adopting the platform.
Newer platform users might not remember the Twitter fail whale web page, which appeared as the platform struggled to scale (usually at 8 am PT, as users logged on to find out what had happened overnight).
MeWe will have to ensure that it smoothly incorporates the scalable infrastructure as its membership continues to grow
Long may it continue, MeWe. I love what I’m seeing so far. An ad-free social media platform, with an option to pay for extra features, will surely come to dominate the ad-riddled freemium model we have come to hate.
