With Elon Musk’s recent interest in Twitter, Facebook’s growth flattening, and TikTok’s meteoric rise, it feels like the world of social media is back into some kind of inflection point period. Consumers seem hungry to try out new platforms again, and entrepreneurs are delivering. Last year the Supernova app launched as a ‘ethical alternative to instagram’. Now a new social media startup - WeAre8 - hopes to literally pay consumers for their attention, and is even going out for a crowdfunding round of equity investment to prove it.

I would be as skeptical as anyone else that these startups wouldn’t have a chance against the BigTech social platforms, were it not for the fact that WeAre8 is the brainchild of a highly experienced advertising industry entrepreneur who understands the advertising model of social media inside-out and thinks she has the answers to tackle it.

Sue Fennessy emerged from Australia but took her advertising data startup to New York in 2009. Standard Media Index (SMI) has now become one of the staple of the advertising industry, providing data on global media agency expenditure data for all major media and product categories.

A couple of years ago she became incensed at the amount of money going into social media platforms like Facebook, where platforms like it were being used to spread mis-and-dis-information about everything from politics to the pandemic.

Fennessy told me that SMI had tracked $250 billion of ad money spent around the world: “All of this money was going to Google and Facebook. And on a macro level, I became massively distressed because we were seeing journalism implode [We Are8 recently sponsored the ‘Byline’ journalism festival]. We saw the misinformation about the climate, and the pandemic, and yet the average engagement rate on a digital ad on Facebook is under 1%. So we thought, how can we have $100 billion last year - and a billion of that was from charities - paying Facebook, and yet such appalling advertising effectiveness for brands.”