The same venture capitalists who bankrolled WhatsApp and Whisper are now putting their money on YikYak, an anonymous and controversial messaging service that has already been spreading like a virus across American college campuses.
Sequoia Capital has led a $62 million funding round into YikYak, according to The Wall Street Journal, marking the startup’s third funding round in the one year it has been live. It reportedly values the startup with just over a dozen employees in the “low hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Despite its infancy in a market teeming with anonymous messaging apps, Sequoia seems to have a lot of faith in YikYak: lead partner Jim Goetz is reportedly joining the startup’s board. Goetz is known for turning a multi-million dollar investment into WhatsApp into billions when Facebook bought the messaging startup for $19 billion in February.
Based in Atlanta, YikYak has more in common with anonymous posting app Whisper than WhatsApp. It combines a
Students at the University of San Francisco told Forbes’ Ellen Huet that the app was essentially a time suck, but that they were compelled to join if and when their name got mentioned.
YikYak spreads by getting picked up at one school, and then moving on to students at other schools when friends mix during the summer break. Around 200 American colleges were using YikYak before the 2014 summer break, for instance, and that number jumped to 1,000 when schools started again in the autumn, according to the WSJ.
For all that impressive growth, YikYak has become a nightmare for kids who are the target of bullies.
Digital masks can bring out the troll in more people than you would expect, as anyone who has perused the anonymous messaging boards of 4chan will know, and when it comes to high schools, YikYak appears to be piping some of that nihilistic "chan" culture directly into school corridors.
One high school senior wrote a compelling essay for New York Magazine in April explaining how the arrival of YikYak in his school created a deeply uncomfortable tension between students. It quickly became a platform for anyone to blast both the popular and unpopular with insults. Among them (with real names abbreviated):
“K is a slut.”
"The cheer team couldn't get uglier."
“No one asked H. to the prom because no one has a fork lift.”
“J.T.’s gonna get lynched at SMU.”
YikYak’s secret bulletin boards haven't just been used for slandering peers but in some cases threatening violence too. Violent posts in a school in Southern California worried administrators enough to close the school for two days, and some have called for schools to ban YikYak entirely. Last month in YikYak's home town of Atlanta, Emory University passed a resolution denouncing the app as a "platform for hate speech or harassment."
The app’s creators, Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, have an age 17 rating on their app and have dealt more aggressively with the issue by by geofencing some high schools out of access - essentially identifying where schools are using YikYak and blocking service in that area. But they have yet to completely solve the problem.
Apps who find success in the anonymous messaging space face a stressful trade off between viral success and scandal, ie. problems surrounding the titillating content that makes them so attractive in the first place.
Whisper has been criticized for being a platform for bullies, but in its bid to weed out bullying behaviour by tracking people and working with media companies it has also raised major concerns about user privacy.
With its new round of funding YikYak will probably spend more money on finding a balance between keeping the privacy of its users secure, while weeding out bullying and aggressive behaviour. If that works, it could make that lucrative jump from high school and college cliques, to the masses.
Update: A rep from Whisper emailed in to say: "By design, Whisper is not a platform for bullies. You can't use proper names on Whisper specifically to prevent bullying and we have a moderation team to enforce it."
