What you need to know:

• WeAre8 has farewelled, Lizzie Young, who wrapped up her roles as APAC chief executive and global chief growth officer on Thursday after leading the platform’s Australian rollout since July 2022.
• She is replaced by Danika Johnston, who becomes WeAre8 Australia’s managing director, dropping her former chief commercial officer title though keeping a commercial remit. Young’s global role will be rehomed within the platform’s UK headquarters.
• The reshuffling comes as the B Corp backed social media play nears the second anniversary of its UK launch, with usership figures well behind founder Zoe Kalar’s (formerly Sue Fennessey) initial projections – global users now stand at 2.5 million versus the 100 million targeted for the end of the current financial year.  
• With scaling a key challenge for the platform, chief marketing officer Luke Robinson says WeAre8 is working to build out the project beyond the native WeAre8 app.
• One hope is that the platform benefits from the current scrutiny faced by Meta and TikTok.

Logging out

There’s been a changing of the guard at WeAre8’s Sydney outpost, with APAC chief Lizzie Young wrapping up with the social media challenger on Thursday.

Young, who joined the platform ahead of its Australian launch in the second half of 2022, made the call to leave in January, almost a year after picking up an extended global remit as chief growth officer. The decision, she says, ultimately came down to challenges of working to a global time zone. With no immediate plans for her next role, the former Nine Entertainment MD will now enjoy some down time after 25 years in media.

WeAre8’s former chief commercial officer Danika Johnston steps up as managing director for Australia, though she will maintain commercial responsibilities over brands, agencies and strategic partnerships in the local market. The Australian executive team is rounded out by global chief marketing officer, Luke Robinson, and global chief financial officer, John Rohl, with Young’s global growth remit be rehoused within WeAre8’s global headquarters in the UK.

The changes come as the B-Corp platform doubles down on its social good proposition ahead of the second anniversary of its UK launch in April 2022. All eyes were on the new age social media startup as it promised to deliver a feel-good alternative to the likes of Meta and TikTok, touting a mantra of “changing the world” via a subverted ad model that pays users per ad view. Users can elect to shift these earnings – approximately 12 to 39 cents per video, depending on the length – directly to a charity of their choosing.

Scale struggles

WeAre8’s ultimate ambition, per founder and chief executive Zoe Kalar (formerly Sue Fennessey) – who took to LinkedIn earlier this month to announce her new name – was to recruit 1 percent of the global population, or 80 million users.  

While that figure is still a “guiding north star” for the new age social media player, WeAre8’s Robinson said “sustainable growth” has become core to the model.

“The ad experience is part of the user experience, so we have to [grow] in a way that is bringing in ad demand and user demand at the same time,” he said. “We know that when the ad experience is there at heightened levels people are actually willing to give up their time.”

Growth has been much slower than Kalar's ambition. Global downloads have just ticked over 2.5 million. Locally, Australian users are yet to tick the 400,000 thousand that Kalar in 2022 told Mi3 was a “conservative target” for early 2023. But Robinson insists it’s on its way, with “hundreds of thousands” of people now registered on the platform locally.

Robinson admits that scaling has been the biggest challenge for WeAre8, noting that its local usership is “more comparable to a small publisher” than Meta’s 16.65 million local users, or the 8.5 million on TikTok.

He said evolving the product outside of the native WeAre8 app will be core to the platform’s growth strategy.

“What we are doing in product evolution is kind of wrapping a network around the actual app as a home base,” he explains, noting that the details will come to light in the coming months.

The platform is also hoping to benefit from the fallout of Meta and TikTok’s ongoing legal challenges, as the US moves to boot the latter if its Chinese parent company ByteDance does not divest its shares. The bill to ban the short-form video app is in front of the US senate at the same time as Australian politics grapples with Meta’s decision to cut funding to Australian publishers, turning its back on the government’s news media bargaining code.

As a self-professed “healthier alternative” to big tech, Robinson said WeAre8 has taken learnings from other’s mistakes – particularly when it comes to the safety of its users.

The platform has pre-empted the creation of troll or fraud accounts by requiring users verify their accounts with a unique mobile phone number, with additional content moderation measures that combine artificial intelligence, automation and human oversight.

Smaller base – but better engagement 

Robinson suggests WeAre8’s community focus is also a key differentiator, with the platform having done away with direct messaging in a bid to encourage open forum.

It all comes down to the platform’s vision of a utopian social environment where brands, creators and users – known as ‘citizens’ in-app – can engage meaningfully online.

“There are a lot of brands out there and they all have a story of purpose and a story of impact to tell around what they are doing as brands to make the world a better place - and we know more than ever that people are looking to brands to help them guide their purchasing decisions and be a champion of change,” per Robinson.

“There's a lot of stories that [brands] have out there that they can't tell on other platforms,” he said. “Because if it's not something that social media users agree with, they more often than not will get absolutely trolled.”

The opportunity to leverage corporate social responsibility activities is one that has been welcomed by a long list of blue-chip corporate clients globally.

Robinson rattles off a few local examples from the last few months: “We’ve had Praise showing us how they're reducing food waste; we've had Coca Cola showing us how they're cleaning up the Great Barrier Reef – huge amounts of waste from the Great Barrier Reef on an annual basis. Suncorp uses [WeAre8] to tell their story around Team Girls.”

The platform’s ad stack covers the six second clip through to two minutes, but it’s the latter that are driving the most impact, per Robinson, because users have “opted in to watch it” and thus are “actually willing to give up their time”.

By in this way circumventing the high-scroll tendencies of social media users, Robinson argued WeAre8 is “enabling brands [to do] what they really love and [revisit] those big brand storytelling [moments]”.

Sustained attention on bigger brand moments naturally lends itself to higher levels of user engagement, that Robinson suggests helps the platform punch above its weight from a user perspective.

He cited WeAre8’s partnership with BBC Studios to distribute its BBC Earth content, which the platform signed late last year. Robinson said the brand’s 6,000-strong following on WeAre8 is “not too far off” its 10.5 million followers on Instagram, in terms of engagement – i.e. comments and likes.

While advertising is integral to the revenue model, it’s not a free-for-all – WeAre8 won’t work with tobacco or fossil fuel companies, due in part to its strict B Corp guidelines. But that won’t stop the platform teaming up with brands who are less than perfect in their sustainability credentials, he said, so long as they are “on a journey to better what they are doing from a brand perspective.”