What is Vero?

If you use Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter regularly, you might have heard of Vero in the past couple of days. Vero is a new social media app, which has no ads, and no algorithms dictating your newsfeed (hello chronological order, I’ve missed you).

It works like most other social media apps, it lets you share photos and videos, add links, and make recommendations to friends. It is now number 1 in Apple’s UK store, having been number 99 a week ago. It has almost 1 million users, having added 500,000+ in the past couple of days.

Vero is billed as the social network that “lets you be yourself” and was launched in 2015 by Ayman Hariri. In an interview, Mr Hariri said he was frustrated with the number of adverts that appear on other social media websites and apps. As well as having no adverts, Vero won’t be mining your data to sell to future advertisers either, which is reassuring for the careful few among us.

In practice it works very similarly to Instagram, but with users being able to share text and URLS, and recommendations as previously mentioned. There are currently over 500,000 posts on Instagram tagged as #Vero, the majority of which are users posting their Vero profiles and asking people to follow them.

Vero also makes a difference between friends and followers. When you begin your profile, you can choose to have just friends, or also followers too. Then within the friends’ setting there are 3 tiers – close friends, friends, and acquaintances.

That’s the low down on Vero - let’s see if they can keep up the growth, and how Instagram respond!