How Yubo grew its business while minimizing dependence on ads

While many social platforms rely heavily on advertising and influencer partnerships, Yubo has taken a different approach, generating revenue from user-paid premium features designed to enhance live interactions

For nearly two decades, the social media playbook has been remarkably consistent: grow a massive user base, sell their attention to advertisers, and watch revenue pour in. The model works. Just ask any major platform reporting quarterly earnings.

But Yubo never followed that playbook.

As one of Yubo’s strongest markets globally, Australia has seen the platform’s age-assurance systems take on added significance following recent efforts to limit social-media access for users under 17. As verification expectations rise, Yubo’s established approach aligns closely with the direction of Australian policy and youth-safety priorities.

The Paris-based social discovery platform, which just transitioned to serving only users 18 and older, has built a profitable business selling premium features directly to users rather than selling user attention to brands. It’s a model dating apps have tried with mixed results. Yubo’s long-term profitability suggests that its approach is gaining traction.

The company has been in business for 10 years without relying on advertising revenue. According to CEO and co-founder Sacha Lazimi, this wasn’t an ideological choice but a practical one. Yubo users come to the platform for authentic social interaction, not content consumption, and interrupting that experience with ads would destroy the product experience the company is selling.

The Commerce Problem

Most social platforms evolved into something their founders never quite intended: shopping channels. Influencer partnerships, sponsored posts, native advertising. What began as spaces for connection became venues for commerce.

The business logic is sound. Platforms with hundreds of millions of users can generate billions in advertising revenue. But there’s a trade-off. Optimizing for advertiser value often means maximizing engagement at any cost, prioritizing content that keeps eyeballs on screen, and turning users into audiences rather than participants.

Yubo watched that evolution and realized it wasn’t compatible with what the company was building. You can’t sell authentic human connection if you’re constantly interrupting it to sell something else.

So Yubo took a different path. Yubo reports that it generates revenue through premium features that enhance social interaction rather than interrupting it. Users pay for things like enhanced profile visibility, livestream boosts that increase the number of people who see their broadcast, and customization options that help them express themselves more fully.

It’s essentially a freemium model borrowed from gaming rather than social media. The core experience remains free. Premium features offer advantages but aren’t necessary to participate meaningfully on the platform.

Where Dating Apps Struggled

This isn’t entirely novel. Dating apps have tried similar approaches for years, with varying success. Many struggle because their premium features create artificial scarcity around what users actually want: matches and messages.

The dynamic breeds frustration. Users feel the platform is deliberately withholding connections to extract payment. Some dating apps have faced criticism for this exact issue, with users questioning whether algorithms intentionally limit free-tier matches to drive subscription conversions.

Yubo’s model works differently because the value proposition isn’t access to people. It’s enhancement of experiences users already value.

“We’re not gatekeeping connections,” says Sacha Lazimi, Yubo’s CEO. “Everyone has full access to livestreams, messaging, and profile browsing. Premium features just make it easier to be discovered if that’s what you want. It’s an enhancement, not a restriction.”

The most engaged Yubo users, according to internal data, are those who’ve made five to ten genuine connections on the platform. According to internal trends, users who form several meaningful connections often show greater interest in optional premium features. This pattern may support a reinforcing loop where positive experiences encourage deeper participation.

The Retention Advantage

Advertising-driven models typically benefit from high user engagement time, while user-paid models rely more on perceived value. More screen time equals more ad impressions equals more revenue. But maximizing screen time doesn’t necessarily mean maximizing user satisfaction.

Yubo’s business model flips this. The platform makes money when users are satisfied enough with their experience to pay for enhancements. That means Yubo’s incentives align more closely with user wellbeing than engagement metrics.

The company wants people to use Yubo, make friends, and then go hang out, maybe offline. If they’re having great experiences, they’ll come back. If they’re not, no amount of engagement optimization will keep them on the platform long term.

This shows up in product decisions. Yubo doesn’t use infinite scroll or addictive ads or content. Sessions are built around specific interactions (joining a livestream, having a conversation) rather than endless content consumption. The platform doesn’t algorithmically curate feeds to maximize engagement because there aren’t feeds to curate.

The company reports that its design choices tend to support more intentional engagement, rather than passive feed-scrolling. According to Yubo’s internal data, the typical livestream session lasts around two hours, similar to hanging out with friends in person. That’s meaningful interaction, not mindless scrolling.

The Premium Features Strategy

Yubo’s premium offerings fall into several categories, all designed to enhance rather than unlock core functionality:

Visibility enhancements like Spotlight, which positions a user’s profile at the top of other users’ home screens, and Turbo, which prioritizes profiles in the swipe feature. These help users who want to meet more people do so faster.

Engagement tools like Boosts, which users can apply to increase the visibility of their livestreams. Users can choose single or multiple boosts, and the livestream with the most boosts ranks highest in the app.

Premium packs are offered at various price points for weekly and monthly subscriptions, with monthly options providing better value for regular users. Users can also purchase in-app currency (YuBucks) to access individual features à la carte.

Critically, Yubo occasionally runs competitions and giveaways for free premium features, maintaining the principle that these enhancements should feel aspirational but accessible, not exclusionary.

Quality Over Quantity

Yubo’s recent transition to 18+ reflects the platform’s natural evolution. The user base had already aged up organically – the company reports that more than 90% of its users are 18+ and that, in internal surveys, most respondents describe the platform as geared toward young adults. The policy change simply formalizes what had already happened.

This clarity benefits everyone. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, Yubo can focus on creating the best possible experience for the audience that’s actually using the platform. It’s the same principle that drives their monetization strategy: quality over quantity, focused execution over trying to serve every possible use case.

Scaling the Model

The critical question is whether Yubo’s monetization approach can scale to compete with advertising-driven platforms. The unit economics are fundamentally different.

Advertising models benefit from massive scale. More users mean more inventory to sell. Premium feature models benefit from high-quality experiences that drive conversion. Those aren’t mutually exclusive, but they require different operational focus.

Yubo states that it generated approximately €60 million in annual revenue last year, and the company reports profitability in major markets and sustainable growth without recent external funding rounds. That’s notable in an industry where many platforms burn cash pursuing growth at any cost.

The social discovery category may be particularly suited to this model. Users seeking authentic connection inherently value quality over quantity. They’re looking for meaningful interactions, not maximum content consumption. And they’re often in life stages (post-college, early career, relocating for work) where making new friends feels both crucial and difficult enough to justify paying for tools that help.

The Future of Social Monetization

Yubo’s success raises questions about the future of social platform business models. As users grow increasingly skeptical of advertising-driven platforms and their effects on content quality and user wellbeing, alternative approaches become more viable.

There appears to be a shift happening. Users are willing to pay for experiences they value, particularly if those experiences aren’t constantly interrupted by ads. The gaming industry figured this out years ago. Social platforms are just catching up.

Now, as that generation navigates early adulthood, Yubo is positioning itself as the platform that grows with them, maintaining the same business model that prioritizes user experience over advertiser interests.

For now, Yubo represents proof of concept: social platforms can monetize through user value rather than advertiser value. They can prioritize authentic connection over engagement maximization. And they can build profitable businesses without turning their platforms into shopping channels.

For investors and entrepreneurs watching the social media landscape evolve, that’s worth paying attention to.