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Casey Niestat sells his app to CNN for R348 million

You might have heard of a YouTuber by the name of Casey Niestat but did you know he has his own app?

Well at least he did until it was announced this week that Beme (pronounced “beam”) had been sold to CNN for the tidy sum of $25 million (~R348 million).

Beme allowed users to share quick, unedited video clips with the internet and while Niestat’s involvement in the creation of the app helped boost it’s initial popularity it didn’t have quite the same hold on its users as apps like Snapchat or Instagram do.

The app will shut down on 31st January 2016 and all employees will become part of a new team at CNN that is focused on developing the new outlet’s mobile media effort according to the Wall Street Journal.

Unlike the vlog, this isn’t over

Co-founder and chief technology officer of Beme, Matt Hackett says that while Beme is a single failed product, the idea of where media and technology is headed is only “just getting started.”

“Social media is supposed to connect across geographies and beliefs, to be the tool for building a less cruel and more creative world. It is this idealism for what technology can achieve that built Beme,” wrote Hackett in a blog post. “Recent days have made it crushingly obvious that the social media we have built so far — at Beme or elsewhere — has not yet achieved this ideal.”

The co-founder says that the world got a slice of this vision with it’s app Exit Poll Live which he says, “was a small antidote to the filter bubbles of traditional social media, streaming the unfiltered views of real voters across the country on election day.”

You can see exactly what Exit Poll Live is in the video below.

Sadly, while the Wall Street Journal reports that Niestat will still have control of his social media accounts and his 5.8 million subscriber strong YouTube channel, the vlog still appears to be very much over.

[Via – Wall Street Journal]

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