🔥 Gas App and The Premise of Positivity
What social media's new fleeting king may unveil about true consumer (and founder) motivations
There is a new king of the App Store. The Gas app has taken the #1 seat on the App Store, over TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and notably the more recent BeReal.
What is it? Claiming to promote positivity, the app allows high schoolers to find their crush and see who likes them, claiming to give people confidence and positivity boosts. Here’s a 30-second overview of the app from their TikTok account
Why is this important and what can brands and advertisers learn?
Gas App shows what it takes for a new social app to stick (why BeReal vs TikTok Now vs Gas App vs the next greatest),
It provides insight into the most trusted and powerful Gen Z distribution channel
It shows us when…or why (if at all) controversies and privacy may prevail over preferences
It unveils a potential new threat to young people: The Premise of Positivity
1. Is the Gas App here to stay?
BeReal continues to grow in new monthly downloads - September saw 14.7M, a jump from 12.3M in August. While reports show only 9% of those 15M are daily active users, the app has clearly demonstrated it was more than just a trend, inspiring copycats from TikTok, Instagram, and Snap.
Let’s take a look at the data; while Nikita Bier, Gas App’s founder, has boasted some pretty impressive numbers on Twitter (1M DAU on Oct 21, $1M in sales on Oct 23, and a 40-50% penetration per school within 36 hours), the app seems to be slowing down on TikTok with its views on user-generated content.
The percent change in views week over week is now starting to decrease (showing the app is decelerating). While the Gas App team continues to open to new states and schools at impressively fast rates, the talk online does not seem to reflect this “growth”. For comparison, here is #bereal against #gasapp.
What are Gen Z’ers saying about the app’s staying power?
If/when it is nationwide, it still seems poised to lose its momentum just as quickly as it arrives. And this fleeting momentum does not bode well for its staying power.
It seems as if the Gas App was actually never designed to stay.
Nikita Bier, the founder, said in a piece from Bloomberg “Only if this lasts for a period of time, kind of a hit like a game for a fleeting moment, that impact would still be so meaningful for millions of teens.”
More to come on this in section 4…
2. What does this show us about Gen Z’s most powerful distribution channel?
While it may not be here to stay, Gas brilliantly played into an understanding of young audiences. The app encourages users to share their results on Snap, as seen below:
And with little to no ad dollars spent (similar to BeReal), this is where Gas has hit a home run. Much of the gas user-generated content centers around people seeing it on Snap, which has in part played into how fed up people are with seeing it everywhere.
Snap story sharing for Gas has become a double-edged sword; both catalyzing rapid growth and inciting overexposure.
The story (Instagram vs Snap stories have very different use cases) can be a powerful distribution channel - tapping into the trust and intimacy of friends, at scale. While Gas and BeReal leveraged the story-at-scale in different ways (the former a near-forced share, and the latter an elected), in both cases almost no advertising dollars were spent. That, compared to the nearly $20B spent by ByteDance in 2021 to acquire new users, is a feat to note.
3. Controversy, privacy, and consumer preferences
Gas was framed by its users as a sex trafficking app. While Gas App has assured users that their claims are false, the rumors nonetheless have taken hold of many Gen Z’ers, inspiring fear among young people and news outlets alike. This TikTok seems to sum up the resulting actions from young people perfectly:
Another user commented on a similar video to compare the Gas App to Snap Maps, which shows users the live location of their friends.
At the core of this discrepancy (why not delete Snap vs Gas) could be the size of the rumor itself, but perhaps the more accurate interpretation is the one shared by @yofavbrownskinn above. Many Gen Z’ers seemingly weigh a balance of controversy/harm against preference and enjoyment. Gas may just not provide users as much utility as TikTok or Snap, and for that reason alone, the risk of the controversy is not worth the continued use.
4. The Premise of Positivity
According to Bier, “The reason I built [Gas] was because I wanted to bring back what tbh did for so many kids five years ago, which was raise self-esteem and spread positivity,”.
In 2017, Bier launched tbh, a nearly identical app for teens to share anonymous compliments. Look familiar?
In 73 days, Facebook acquired tbh for $100 MILLION dollars. Just under a year later, Facebook shut it down.
Tbh (hah), it seems like nobody is asking questions. Why is one person seemingly obsessed with building apps that allow high schoolers to flirt with each other anonymously?
Is it because he truly believes in improving the self-esteem of high schoolers? Or is it because he can exit for $100M once, build the same exact app and make millions on it again?
And even more importantly, is it really improving the mental health of teenagers?
Is Gas designed to fleet? Does it play on the raw and undeveloped emotions of high schoolers? There are some 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩.
Screen time may tell the true tale…
In one month, dcdx will release the 2nd Annual Gen Z Screen Time Report. There, we will see the true story - how much time are Gen Z’ers truly spending on BeReal, Gas App, and others? How much has changed from last year’s standings? More time on TikTok or less?
To get early access to that report, sign up here.
A final thought:
There are many more deeply rooted insights that emerge from the study of Gas App - whether or not the founder’s intentions are pure, he continues to unlock a powerful emotion and behavior, driving community-wide, mass adoption at scale, in a matter of hours, not years.
For more on what this is and what brands and marketers can do to understand it, reply with “Gas us up” and we’ll get a meeting set up. Or just reply with anything tbh.