Meerkat is dying

http://bgr.com/2015/03/30/meerkat-vs-periscope-analysis-journalism

by nkurz • 11 years ago

187 104 11 years ago

Not all is lost for Meerkat if they do FB connect. The Twitter first strategy only works for SV.

As a caveat, Meerkat did make a bone headed move by abusing the twitter api with auto follows. Twitter probably stepped in to far also by cutting their social graph.

minimaxir5• 11 years ago

Does a FB Connect strategy actually work nowadays? Most startups I've seen try it get complaints like "do I HAVE to use Facebook?"

untog2• 11 years ago

Most startups I've seen try it get complaints like "do I HAVE to use Facebook?"

On Hacker News, yes. Amongst normal users it's absolutely fine, particularly if you're delivering some kind of social benefit (i.e. actually using the social graph you are given access to)

feverishaaron• 11 years ago

I suspect Periscope's meteoric rise has to do more with being prominently featured in the "Best New Apps" section since day one. It was well after Meerkat reached peak-blogger that it appeared in that section, and even so, I don't believe it was in the #1 slot.

encoderer• 11 years ago

I think accounts of Meerkat's life and death are both being greatly exaggerated here. It's a contender, it now has a war chest, lets see what the guys can do with it.

And I think it's unfair to suggest they just "cashed in" for the quick buck.

malloreon• 11 years ago

I'm gonna go ahead and guess twitter's "war chest" is a little bigger than Meerkat's.

bigdubs3• 11 years ago

I'm gonna go ahead and guess that those things aren't really comparable.

oimaz• 11 years ago

In the beginning, VC investment is always potential. Realizing that potential takes time. So, I don't think it makes sense jump to conclusions too soon

minimaxir5• 11 years ago

I had a debate with one of TechCrunch's head editors about the journalistic coverage of Meerkat: https://twitter.com/ryanlawler/status/582547758248136704

Coincidentally TechCrunch published a more analytical approach a few hours later: http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/schrodingers-meerkat/

What really annoys me is that no one took the devil's advocate approach to analyzing Meerkat. "It's a new paradigm in live-streaming," perhaps, but no one has considered that such a paradigm only fits in the narcissistic Silicon Valley culture.

Periscope atleast managed to appeal to non-techies, but even then, it appears to have peaked. In the first week of release.

There's a nonzero probability that everyone was wrong about personal livestreaming in the first place.

killwhitey• 11 years ago

One thing I find curious is none of the articles about meerkat (that I've read) have mentioned that Color did the same idea in 2011 [1] as one of it's many pivots. I'm curious as to what's different between the two and why one might succeed where another failed.

[1] http://www.androidstatic.com/color-for-facebook-streams-your...

untog2• 11 years ago

Qik was doing this ages ago. If I were to be cynical I'd say that this is different because it's backed by a big VC firm, which in turn gives them access to hype. But nothing more.

prawn• 11 years ago

Meerkat could still go the way of Color. They're quite early in their public life, from what I can tell, and suddenly facing a much stronger competitor.

johnrob• 11 years ago

And, people forget that Justin.tv worked this space pretty hard before transitioning to video game broadcasting.

bentcorner2• 11 years ago

As a non-iPhone user that has seen neither meerkat or periscope, what's the new thing here? Justin.tv/twitch and ustream have been doing live streaming for a long time now.

georgeecollins2• 11 years ago

I was convinced something like justin.tv or ustream would be popular, and I was wrong. One of the founders said later: there are only a few things you want to watch live.

jacquesm• 11 years ago

And we worked that space for a decade longer still.

jim_greco• 11 years ago

Of course there's a nonzero probability. That's an easy conjecture to make about any startup taking on something brand new. You'll always find hundreds of reasons to say no in venture investing.

But what if they're right? What if does become a hit? What if this is a great new communications paradigm? Then the $12M greylock put in or the $100M purchase of periscope is a frickin' bargain.

minimaxir5• 11 years ago

The nonzero probability was more toward the journalistic implications than the financial implications. TechCrunch had written several articles on how Meerkat would feed a new generation of empathy, which I strongly question.

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

I had never heard of Meerkat until the press started hyperventilating about the Periscope launch. I can see it being really useful for filming the police or other breaking news/public interest video where quality doesn't matter. But otherwise Vine probably does a better job; a 6-second glimpse into someone else's life is about as much unedited hand-held video as I'd want to see for most purposes.

recursive• 11 years ago

I had never heard of either one until I saw this post.

azinman2• 11 years ago

Apples and oranges.

Vine is about a curated video with some kind of very short & punchy narrative. Then spreading that as much as possible.

Periscope/Meerkat is about 'teleporting' yourself into something... the fact that you know it's live gives you a sense of curiosity and waiting to see if something fun will happen. Furthermore, you can comment on it and have the person broadcasting see it so thus you can actually affect the video while it's happening. Being part of it is essential to the experience.

tlrobinson• 11 years ago

What makes Periscope more appealing to non-techies than Meerkat?

Twitter certainly has a large existing user base they can promote Periscope to (I haven't been paying enough attention to know if they have been), whereas Meerkat has mostly been written about in the tech media.

Also, there are plenty of other much more narcissistic cultures...

xcrunner529• 11 years ago

It is pretty hilarious. Ben Thompson (who I usually like) was all bullish on it and kept using it and it just seemed sad...like old men in tech desperately trying to be "hip" and find the next hip thing and how the rest just "don't understand". Pretty funny.

InspecteurConan• 11 years ago

I want to know how Ben Rubin dare to pretend having more than 1 million users ? now we start to have to some data for both periscope and meerkat (http://lookats.com/stats), i don't understand how you can throw millions on something like this + all this media coverage for a few thousand users ?

solve• 11 years ago

The ugly truth that U.S. tech media

The ugly truth that U.S. tech media doesn't make any effort to investigate startup launches, they copy and paste articles that are handed to them :)

chuckreynolds• 11 years ago

^ yup exactly

jfb• 11 years ago

Tech media makes sports media look like The Partisan Review.

EDIT: Stupid bbcode making me look stupid.

georgeecollins2• 11 years ago

Sports media and weather reports are typically the most fact based things you see in old media. Both are about what happened, and what is going to happen and what opinion is presented is very blatant and well understood.

smacktoward2• 11 years ago

If readers were willing to pay for good journalism, they would receive some.

borgia• 11 years ago

If readers were willing to pay for good journalism, they would receive some.

This is it. Tech journalism is a cesspit of clickbait, hysteria and social justice nonsense because nobody is paying for it and this appeal to the lowest-common-denominator of clicks brings in money.

But then nobody is going to be willing to pay these entities for the content they're using to current bring in revenue.

DannyBee• 11 years ago

Don't be so cynical. They also add typos!

bane• 11 years ago

Something I wrote recently on this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9207290

"It used to be common to see "paid advertisement" inserts in major magazines. Sometimes going on for a dozen pages. It was clear they were PR pieces: typeset differently and with a different editorial style than the rest of the magazine. Sometime in the mid-2000s they simply seemed to go away and now the magazine just uses the PR pieces as content filler, completely indistinguishable from the rest of the periodical."

swang• 11 years ago

Yeah they call it "native advertising" now.

disbelief2• 11 years ago

or Advertorial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial)

DrJosiah• 11 years ago

Sort of. While it's not universal, many "native advertising" platforms that integrate with content sites will specify that the content is promoted, sponsored, or something similar. As an example, see nativo.net (disclaimer: I worked there briefly in 2013, and all ads/content served had those qualifiers).

AndrewKemendo• 11 years ago

Interesting because I only heard of meerkat starting about two weeks ago during SXSW. It seemed like it was everywhere, but not because of headlines, because I kept seeing [LIVE NOW] on all these tweets. Too bad all those links just went nowhere because I was too late.

Funny cause this week I saw Jim Gaffigan post a sernies of meerkat videos onto youtube. I thought, well doesn't that defeat the purpose of a snapchat style broadcast - if someone wants to save it? Clearly I wasn't the only one.

tootie• 11 years ago

First time I heard of meerkat is when I heard that it was getting beaten by periscope.

austenallred7• 11 years ago

Holy hell, the app is two weeks old, there are tens of thousands of tweets about it every day, and it has $20 million dollars in the bank. Is this really what we're calling "dying" now? Because if so, pretty much every other consumer product since the beginning of time is fucked.

I haven't turned off Meerkap notifications on my phone, mostly out of sheer curiosity, and I am seeing literally hundreds of meerkat streams per day of my followers. Apparently you don't have to be at the top of the chart to get hundreds of thousands of downloads (not to mention the app being featured by the app store).

This is such shitty journalism I can't even stand it. Let's have a substantive discussion about a product, but calling it "dead" is bullshit clickbait and even the author must know it.

minimaxir5• 11 years ago

You're not exactly impartial when it comes to Meerkat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269693

The reason companies take venture capital is to facilitate growth. If the company is trending downward three days after funding, especially in the immediate response to a direct competitor, that's a very bad sign, both for the company, and the venture capital firm.

bigdubs3• 11 years ago

See relevant image of startup lifecycle: http://www.vccafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/startup-cur...

stathack• 11 years ago

you can't really call it a trend with just accounting three days worth of data.

austenallred7• 11 years ago

I never claimed to be impartial. I use both apps and have been following them closely. I think Periscope will win some portion of the market, and Meerkat another. Saying that it's screwed right now, while there's still so much excited activity, is still bunk.

Almost every app's growth slows after a viral launch. In a few days we'll see Periscope's growth slowing as well. That doesn't mean they all die.

pron• 11 years ago

Wasn't the same true of Secret? Some people living in a certain bubble felt a buzz that just wasn't really there anywhere outside said bubble.

nazgul• 11 years ago

I never heard of Meerkat before this article. So the press blitz wasn't that great.

dacort• 11 years ago

Interesting seeing the activity on Twitter and how quickly Periscope caught up once it was released: https://twitter.com/dacort/status/582570506043310080

Someone• 11 years ago

Extrapolating by eye, with a biased look, one could describe that as "Total market is growing, Periscope briefly grabbed it, but will be gone within a week"

An eye biased the other way could say that Periscope managed to reach everybody interested in this kind of product, and made them all realize that they aren't really interested at the same time, whereas Meerkat was discovering that at a slower pace, concluding that both products are doomed.

Retention numbers might be able to prove either of these explanations wrong.

Either way, venture capital is aiming for greater gains by taking larger risks. Because of that, even if Meerkat fails, the decision to invest in it still might have been the right one.

gdilla• 11 years ago

What we don't know from the article is Meerkat's engagement stats. If reuse and retention is high, investors may feel they just need to work on an efficient new user funnel to create a healthy growth trajectory. Maybe meerkat was featured by apple and then inevitably lost downloads post-feature. The same thing will happen to periscope which is being featured now. I suspect the platform with the best network effects will reach success faster, and I'd put by money on periscope there because Twitter. But it's premature to say meerkat is dying at this point in time.

acomjean• 11 years ago

Meerkat (the Oreilly news reader) died 9 years ago.

I used to use that site... Something about the name Meerkat.

http://archive.oreilly.com/meerkat.csp?&p=1

ArekDymalski• 11 years ago

There is also no doubt that if Jared Leto and his merry band had realized a week ago that Meerkat would drop out of the top 500 iPhone app chart by Sunday night, they would have slammed their check books shut in a hurry. They were obviously blinded by the tech journalism flimflammery

If the above statement was true, that would mean that this ecosystem doesn't make much sense. Am I naive thinking that founding decisions aren't so emotional, "impulse purchases"?

hodgesmr2• 11 years ago

That depends. Do you believe what is shown on Shark Tank?

mxfh• 11 years ago

1:n mobile live video is probably simply not a mass market thing. Around 2008 there was whole set of those mobile broadcasting services already: flixwagon[1], qik[2], kyte[3], ustream[4], bambuser just to name some. Also a shout out to the original vine which was 2 times as long 12seconds.tv.

Those headlines linking to mostly dead sites and blogs sound quite familiar:

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flixwagon&dateRange=all

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=qik&dateRange=custom&sort=byPo...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=kyte&dateRange=custom&sort=byP...

[4] http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/05/ustream-launches-mobile-vid...

legohead• 11 years ago

I wonder if Meerkat could have held onto its market share better if it had an Android version also?

Andrex• 11 years ago

Periscope doesn't have an Android app, so I doubt it.

disbelief2• 11 years ago

That actually makes the argument stronger imo.

atmosx2• 11 years ago

Periscope is good but there are too many features lacking at this point. To mention a few:

1) Privacy: What if I wanna share a stream with just my family?

2) Search: I can't search e.g. for 'racing'

3) Management/rules: Was watching a female from Dubai answering questions about life in Dubai. After about 45 seconds, an idiot came in acting as sex offender more than anything else, driving the level of the conversation down in no time. The 'author' should be able to ban accounts.

Other than that periscope is good and works fine.

tehwebguy2• 11 years ago

Re: 1) I believe the lock button allows you to stream to only specified users

atmosx2• 11 years ago

Hm, might be. Truth to be told, I tried streaming for a very brief period and didn't notice any lock buttons.

simonw• 11 years ago

The author can block users (in fact so can other viewers of the stream - presumably that only affects what they can see themselves though)

kapsteur• 11 years ago

Bigger and faster is the buzz, quicker is the fall.

Meerkat has only one month of service on the store, and already 14M$ in pocket.

protomyth• 11 years ago

Every time I followed a link on twitter to Meerkat, I got the stream is over message. I would be that I'm not the only one and wonder if this might be the difference in the end.

jarjoura• 11 years ago

Both Meerkat and Periscope were hyped at launch. People jumped on the hype and both apps were then left to themselves to prove they can sustain the hype.

Periscope might actually make it because it does a lot of little things right to attract non-techies. I've shared vodka with a bunch of Russians and just this morning laughed with people in France.

Periscope is not without issues though, and it's hard to use when it takes forever to start a stream and constantly buffers in the middle.

It might be too early to call Meerkat dead, but I do think it lacks enough to carry it past the hype. Only time will tell though :)

joeblau• 11 years ago

"STREAM OVER." That is all I've ever seen from Meerkat. I think they did a great job in terms of getting the users behind their product, but the user experience is terrible. I've tried to click on about 15 Meerkat streams in the last 2 weeks and I haven't seen one. At least Periscope has a video archive that lets you watch something even after it's over.

Being in SV and reading all the news, I will say that I thought it was bigger than it actually was. On the other hand, I've seen Periscope videos from all over the world. Twitter seems to have created something great, solving the usability issues which were in Meerkat's product.

nnain• 11 years ago

haha... indeed. "STREAM OVER" is what I see from this app 9/10 times in Meerkat. I got so bugged of the notifications that I logged off from the app 2 days back; before reading this article.

siculars• 11 years ago

Doesn't the relative flipflop between Meerkat and Periscope have more to do with Twitter cutting Meerkat out of the social graph and Periscope having insider trading knowledge of the Twitter platform? How is this not like Microsoft pushing Internet Explorer?

mlmonkey• 11 years ago

FTA: "Almost precisely one year later, the same crew of tech “journalists” who proclaimed Secret would be massively influential, declared Meerkat the next huge social media app."

Can these "journalists" be identified? I didn't follow the Meerkat craze when it happened, but if it's the same crew of people, that's pretty damning.

downandout2• 11 years ago

I still don't understand how you can raise $14M for a social media app and not have an Android version. "Yes, Mr. VC, it's true that we aren't doing well on the iOS charts, and we purposely excluded 85% of the market from using it despite the proliferation of easy-to-use cross-platform dev tools. But we do have a lot of press and a cool logo....it's a Meerkat! Did Tom give you our wire instructions?".

treelovinhippie• 11 years ago

Yeah Android user here. Always frustrating when it's iOS only when as you said, Android has 85% global market share. The usual rebuttal seems to be "iOS users are more sophisticated or wealthy, we'll release Android later".

downandout2• 11 years ago

The usual rebuttal seems to be "iOS users are more sophisticated or wealthy

That actually can be a valid argument IF your revenue model is heavily skewed toward IAP or you are charging up front for the app. But for a free social media app whose sole purpose in life is to get as many active users as humanly possible, it's absurd not to have an Android version when it represents most of the market.

chaz• 11 years ago

Because iOS is a huge market all by itself.

sgarman• 11 years ago

It seems that it's not obvious they had a real plan for success. If you are still figuring things out spreading that across platforms will just make you slower.

I have done Android apps for companies who did not have product market fit and it just ends up in having two apps that don't have product market fit.

rargulati• 11 years ago

The key differentiator is the subtle switch to 1-with-many (along with advancements in and proliferation of mobile technology + bandwidth). This leads to shared experiences, which are quite different from the 1:n (1-to-n) model.

The eye opening moment for me was jumping into a periscope stream, commenting on various things relating to the stream, and having the presenter comment and take action based on what I'd said ("high-five the Philz barista for an amazing coffee"). Really more of a conversation.

The feeling of controlling the experience partially, in my opinion, completely changes the dynamic. Also - I can enter streams of places I've never been to and join someone on their adventure. With enough syndication, eventually we can all join in on these adventures with people that have similar interests (subreddit style).

Meerkat opened the floodgates. Periscope is the better execution of the idea.

makeshifthoop• 11 years ago

Meerkat's Hourly Rankings in the last two weeks

https://sensortower.com/ios/us/life-on-air-inc/app/meerkat-t...

Versus Periscope's

https://sensortower.com/ios/us/twitter-inc/app/periscope/972...

coldcode• 11 years ago

15 minutes of fame isn't just for people.

minzinger• 11 years ago

Thought of this. (http://tapastic.com/series/101-uses-for-a-dead-meerkat)

hobarrera• 11 years ago

I've seen a couple of posts regarding this, but none even remotely explain:

WTF is Meerkat (aside from an Ubuntu release, and an animal)?

tempodox• 11 years ago

The article title probably promised too much but if Meerkat's downfall did take any “tech journalism” with it, it would be good riddance. I wonder what the consequences of investors not doing their due diligence will be...

Meerkat is dying

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