Zynn

» see zynn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Zynn opened on 7 May 2020 with an offer nobody else in short video was making out loud. Install it and you got a dollar. Watch videos and you earned points, which came back to you as gift cards or as cash through PayPal. Bring in other people and you earned more. Everything else about the app was a copy of TikTok down to the swipe. The money was the product, and for about a month the money worked.

The company behind it was Kuaishou, the Beijing short-video firm that Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao started in 2011 and that Tencent put two billion dollars into at the end of 2019. Kuaishou was losing the Chinese market to ByteDance and wanted a position in North America before TikTok finished taking it. In December 2019 it bought a small app developer called Owlii, and Owlii built Zynn.

It worked immediately in the only way that could be measured from outside. Two million downloads in the first month, and the most-downloaded position on the US App Store by the end of May. Five days after launch Kuaishou sued ByteDance for unfair competition, accusing Douyin of interfering with app store search results, which is the sound of a company that believes its own numbers.

Zynn shipped to two countries and neither of them was Turkey. Kuaishou's export brand everywhere else is Kwai, which went to Brazil and Southeast Asia under a different name and a different economy, and Zynn was the build made for American phones and American gift cards. There was never a version of it to install here.

~ the case file ~

~ a dollar to sign up ~

The payout structure is what everyone argued about. A dollar for signing up is trivial. The referral chain was not, and the points you earned for watching were released on a schedule that had nothing to do with how much you watched. Researchers called it intermittent variable reward, the same release pattern a slot machine uses, except the slot machine does not also ask you to recruit your friends. Critics called the whole thing a pyramid scheme. Senator Josh Hawley wrote a letter calling it predatory and anti-competitive, which in 2020 was also a way of saying it was Chinese.

What the money bought was a ranking. App store charts in 2020 responded to download velocity, and paying strangers a dollar each is a cheap way to buy velocity if you have Tencent behind you. The number one slot then did the rest of the advertising for free. It is a coherent strategy right up to the point where you stop paying, because the users you bought were never there for the videos.

~ pulled from both stores ~

The videos were the second problem. TikTok creators started finding their entire accounts reposted on Zynn, including one that was impersonating Addison Rae, and a lot of the content was dated months before Zynn had even launched. Google pulled the app from Play on 10 June 2020. Apple pulled it from the App Store six days later. Zynn called the Google removal an isolated incident and eventually returned to both stores with a stricter upload policy, but the six weeks it spent delisted were the six weeks its paid-acquisition engine needed to convert into something durable.

~ the withdrawal ~

By June 2021 Zynn had about 200,000 monthly active users, down from roughly three million the previous August. On 4 August 2021 Kuaishou told users the service would terminate on the twentieth, gave them a 45-day window before the data was deleted, and offered no explanation at all. A spokesperson added that nothing about the decision affected Kwai anywhere else, which was true and also the whole point. The American experiment was the part being closed.

The domain is a parked lander now, dark blue, offering to sell you zynn.com and nothing else. It is a fitting end for an app whose users were bought rather than earned: the last asset with any value left in it was the five letters.

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