What is Venmo? A descriptive analysis of social features in the mobile payment platform

Abstract

This article describes the social features found in Venmo, a US-based payment app. Venmo is a social payments platform that allows users to broadcast transactions to a private social activity stream and a fully public transaction feed. After assessing and measuring the content and structure of public Venmo transaction messages (N = 328,769,355), we present findings related to the types of payment transactions, the frequency of emoji and text in messages used for labeling and earmarking payments, and trends in the temporality of payments from the first six years of the Venmo Public Feed. We explore how affordances in Venmo support social features typically seen in social media platforms with public feeds such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Our findings ultimately detail how mobile payment services like the Venmo support social practices, digital communication, and commerce with social features found in social media platforms. In addition to these descriptive findings, this early Venmo case study develops some implications for the design, study, and impact of researching mobile payment technologies as social media.