With eye to wooing millennials, CNN adds social app to stable

New York

WITH millions of people regularly tuning in to his YouTube video blogs every morning, Casey Neistat has a millennial fan base coveted by both marketers and media companies. Now, one of those big media outlets is bringing Mr Neistat - and, it hopes, his youthful audience - in-house.

CNN announced on Monday that it had agreed to acquire the technology and talent behind Beme, the social media app built and started by Mr Neistat and Matt Hackett, a former vice-president of engineering at Tumblr. Beme's 12 employees will join CNN as part of the deal, the terms of which were not publicly disclosed.

Beme was intended to be a social sharing application that Mr Neistat described as "more authentic", a way of putting out four-second bursts of video without giving users the ability to edit the content. Taking video was as simple as holding a smar…