CNN Brings In the Social App Beme to Cultivate a Millennial Audience

With millions of people regularly tuning in to his YouTube video blogs every morning, Casey Neistat has a millennial fan base coveted by both marketers and media companies. Now, one of those big media outlets is bringing Neistat — and, it hopes, his youthful audience — in-house. CNN announced that it had agreed to acquire the technology and talent behind Beme, the social media app built and started by Neistat and Matt Hackett, a former vice president of engineering at Tumblr. Beme’s 12 employees will join CNN as part of the deal, the terms of which were not publicly disclosed.

Beme was intended to be a social sharing application that Neistat described as “more authentic,” a way of putting four-second bursts of video out into the social sphere without giving users the ability to edit or tweak the content. Taking video was as simple as holding a smartphone’s front-facing sensor to one’s body, as if the camera were an extension of one’s chest. Neistat hopes to bring that idea of authenticity to a news and media environment to draw in a younger audience largely untapped by the cable news network. CNN will shut down the Beme app, which had 1.2 million downloads before losing steam.