9 ms·

Meerkat is dying

187 points by nkurz 12y ago

rebelidealist 12y 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.
- minimaxir 12y 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?"
  - untog 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  I'm gonna go ahead and guess twitter's "war chest" is a little bigger than Meerkat's.
  - bigdubs 12y ago
    I'm gonna go ahead and guess that those things aren't really comparable.
    - clay_to_n 12y ago
      Aren't they, when Twitter now owns Meerkat's competitor Periscope?
      - bigdubs 12y ago
        How different teams use money is not comparable. Meerkat is a small team, 14mm is a huge amount for them. Twitter is a huge company. It is unclear how these things would be used to benchmark one or the other.
- oimaz 12y 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
minimaxir 12y ago
I had a debate with one of TechCrunch's head editors about the journalistic coverage of Meerkat: https://twitter.com/ryanlawler/status/582547758248136704 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/ 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 12y 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-live-video-to-friends/ http://www.androidstatic.com/color-for-facebook-streams-your...
  - untog 12y 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.
    - bjterry 12y ago
      Qik had Marc Benioff, Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz as early investors, before the latter two started their fund as I recall. They didn't have a big VC firm backing them, but they did have notable investors.
  - prawn 12y 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.
solve 12y 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 12y ago
  ^ yup exactly
- jfb 12y ago
  Tech media makes sports media look like The Partisan Review. EDIT: Stupid bbcode making me look stupid.
  - georgeecollins 12y 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.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  If readers were willing to pay for good journalism, they would receive some.
  - borgia 12y 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 12y ago
  Don't be so cynical. They also add typos!
bane 12y ago
Something I wrote recently on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9207290 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 12y ago
  Yeah they call it "native advertising" now.
  - disbelief 12y ago
    or Advertorial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial)
  - DrJosiah 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
First time I heard of meerkat is when I heard that it was getting beaten by periscope.
austenallred 12y 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.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  You're not exactly impartial when it comes to Meerkat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269693 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.
  - bigdubs 12y ago
    See relevant image of startup lifecycle: http://www.vccafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/startup-curve.png http://www.vccafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/startup-cur...
  - stathack 12y ago
    you can't really call it a trend with just accounting three days worth of data.
  - austenallred 12y 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.
nazgul 12y ago
I never heard of Meerkat before this article. So the press blitz wasn't that great.
Yhippa 12y ago
Weren't Secret and Meerkat dubbed the next "killer app" (to borrow a term from the media) by the SxSW circlejerk?
dacort 12y ago
Interesting seeing the activity on Twitter and how quickly Periscope caught up once it was released: https://twitter.com/dacort/status/582570506043310080 https://twitter.com/dacort/status/582570506043310080
- Someone 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 http://archive.oreilly.com/meerkat.csp?&p=1
ArekDymalski 12y 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"?
- hodgesmr 12y ago
  That depends. Do you believe what is shown on Shark Tank?
mxfh 12y 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 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flixwagon&dateRange=all [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=qik&dateRange=custom&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&type=story&dateStart=1167609600&dateEnd=1262390400 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=qik&dateRange=custom&sort=byPo... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=kyte&dateRange=custom&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&type=story&dateStart=1167609600&dateEnd=1262390400 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=kyte&dateRange=custom&sort=byP... [4] http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/05/ustream-launches-mobile-video-broadcasting-apps/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/05/ustream-launches-mobile-vid...
legohead 12y ago
I wonder if Meerkat could have held onto its market share better if it had an Android version also?
- Andrex 12y ago
  Periscope doesn't have an Android app, so I doubt it.
  - disbelief 12y ago
    That actually makes the argument stronger imo.
atmosx 12y 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.
- tehwebguy 12y ago
  Re: 1) I believe the lock button allows you to stream to only specified users
  - atmosx 12y ago
    Hm, might be. Truth to be told, I tried streaming for a very brief period and didn't notice any lock buttons.
- simonw 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
downandout 12y 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 12y 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".
  - downandout 12y 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.
    - calbear81 12y ago
      Social apps inherently need to be trendy and seem "hip" to catch on with the right crowd. Having limited resources, they chose to go with one platform at launch. I would bet that amongst their target taste-maker crowd (celebrities, YouTube personalities, etc.), iOS has higher market share when compared to the larger general smartphone market.
- chaz 12y ago
  Because iOS is a huge market all by itself.
- sgarman 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
Meerkat's Hourly Rankings in the last two weeks https://sensortower.com/ios/us/life-on-air-inc/app/meerkat-tweet-live-video/954105918#category-rankings?category=0&chart_type=topfreeapplications&hourly=true&start_date=2015-03-01&end_date=2015-03-30 https://sensortower.com/ios/us/life-on-air-inc/app/meerkat-t... Versus Periscope's https://sensortower.com/ios/us/twitter-inc/app/periscope/972909677#category-rankings?category=0&chart_type=topfreeapplications&hourly=true&start_date=2015-03-24&end_date=2015-03-30 https://sensortower.com/ios/us/twitter-inc/app/periscope/972...
coldcode 12y ago
15 minutes of fame isn't just for people.
minzinger 12y ago
Thought of this. (http://tapastic.com/series/101-uses-for-a-dead-meerkat http://tapastic.com/series/101-uses-for-a-dead-meerkat)
hobarrera 12y 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 12y 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...

187 points by nkurz 12y 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.

minimaxir 12y 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?"
- untog 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
I'm gonna go ahead and guess twitter's "war chest" is a little bigger than Meerkat's.
- bigdubs 12y ago
  I'm gonna go ahead and guess that those things aren't really comparable.
  - clay_to_n 12y ago
    Aren't they, when Twitter now owns Meerkat's competitor Periscope?
    - bigdubs 12y ago
      How different teams use money is not comparable. Meerkat is a small team, 14mm is a huge amount for them. Twitter is a huge company. It is unclear how these things would be used to benchmark one or the other.
oimaz 12y 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

minimaxir 12y ago

I had a debate with one of TechCrunch's head editors about the journalistic coverage of Meerkat: https://twitter.com/ryanlawler/status/582547758248136704 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/ 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 12y 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-live-video-to-friends/ http://www.androidstatic.com/color-for-facebook-streams-your...
- untog 12y 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.
  - bjterry 12y ago
    Qik had Marc Benioff, Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz as early investors, before the latter two started their fund as I recall. They didn't have a big VC firm backing them, but they did have notable investors.
- prawn 12y 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.

solve 12y 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 12y ago
^ yup exactly
jfb 12y ago
Tech media makes sports media look like The Partisan Review. EDIT: Stupid bbcode making me look stupid.
- georgeecollins 12y 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.
smacktoward 12y ago
If readers were willing to pay for good journalism, they would receive some.
- borgia 12y 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 12y ago
Don't be so cynical. They also add typos!

bane 12y ago

Something I wrote recently on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9207290 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 12y ago
Yeah they call it "native advertising" now.
- disbelief 12y ago
  or Advertorial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial)
- DrJosiah 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago

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

austenallred 12y 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.

minimaxir 12y ago
You're not exactly impartial when it comes to Meerkat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269693 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.
- bigdubs 12y ago
  See relevant image of startup lifecycle: http://www.vccafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/startup-curve.png http://www.vccafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/startup-cur...
- stathack 12y ago
  you can't really call it a trend with just accounting three days worth of data.
- austenallred 12y 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.

nazgul 12y ago

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

Yhippa 12y ago

Weren't Secret and Meerkat dubbed the next "killer app" (to borrow a term from the media) by the SxSW circlejerk?

dacort 12y ago

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

Someone 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 http://archive.oreilly.com/meerkat.csp?&p=1

ArekDymalski 12y 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"?

hodgesmr 12y ago
That depends. Do you believe what is shown on Shark Tank?

mxfh 12y 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 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flixwagon&dateRange=all [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=qik&dateRange=custom&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&type=story&dateStart=1167609600&dateEnd=1262390400 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=qik&dateRange=custom&sort=byPo... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=kyte&dateRange=custom&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&type=story&dateStart=1167609600&dateEnd=1262390400 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=kyte&dateRange=custom&sort=byP... [4] http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/05/ustream-launches-mobile-video-broadcasting-apps/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/05/ustream-launches-mobile-vid...

legohead 12y ago

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

Andrex 12y ago
Periscope doesn't have an Android app, so I doubt it.
- disbelief 12y ago
  That actually makes the argument stronger imo.

atmosx 12y 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.

tehwebguy 12y ago
Re: 1) I believe the lock button allows you to stream to only specified users
- atmosx 12y ago
  Hm, might be. Truth to be told, I tried streaming for a very brief period and didn't notice any lock buttons.
simonw 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.

downandout 12y 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 12y 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".
- downandout 12y 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.
  - calbear81 12y ago
    Social apps inherently need to be trendy and seem "hip" to catch on with the right crowd. Having limited resources, they chose to go with one platform at launch. I would bet that amongst their target taste-maker crowd (celebrities, YouTube personalities, etc.), iOS has higher market share when compared to the larger general smartphone market.
chaz 12y ago
Because iOS is a huge market all by itself.
sgarman 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago

Meerkat's Hourly Rankings in the last two weeks https://sensortower.com/ios/us/life-on-air-inc/app/meerkat-tweet-live-video/954105918#category-rankings?category=0&chart_type=topfreeapplications&hourly=true&start_date=2015-03-01&end_date=2015-03-30 https://sensortower.com/ios/us/life-on-air-inc/app/meerkat-t... Versus Periscope's https://sensortower.com/ios/us/twitter-inc/app/periscope/972909677#category-rankings?category=0&chart_type=topfreeapplications&hourly=true&start_date=2015-03-24&end_date=2015-03-30 https://sensortower.com/ios/us/twitter-inc/app/periscope/972...

coldcode 12y ago

15 minutes of fame isn't just for people.

minzinger 12y ago

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

hobarrera 12y 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 12y 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...