Periscope reveals it has 10M total users and 2M DAUs

Twitter’s acquisition of Periscope earlier this year seemed to set off a whole new industry of live-streaming applications. One day nobody was talking about them, the next day they were everywhere.

Live-streaming is still a nascent industry, and one still has some kinks to work out (we will get into that more later) but is it still an exciting and fast growing one. Now Twitter has some hard numbers to show you just how quickly.

As of August 2 (an important date in history because that’s my birthday) Periscope has passed its 10 millionth account, Twitter announced in a blog post on Medium on Wednesday.

“We launched Periscope just four months ago, on March 26, 2015. We would like to thank every single one of you for taking the time to use something that we’ve worked so hard to create. It means everything to us,” the company wrote.

Even more impressive are the stats on the amount of time spent in the app. Time Watched is defined “as the aggregate amount of time that people spend watching live broadcasts on iOS & Android.” As of last week, Periscope was, get this, seeing over 40 years of video watched per day. (That emphasis is Twitter’s, btw)

It even offered a handy dandy chart to show you just how Time Watched has been climbing:

See that big jump right there after 5/20? That is when Periscope finally launched on Android on May 26. 

It seems like Time Watched is going to be the metric that Twitter will be releasing, at least for the time being since that metric is not “the most important metric for assessing our overall success.”

“Time Watched serves as a proxy for active user growth, without suffering some of the limitations of focusing exclusively on a metric like Daily Active Users (DAU) or Monthly Active Users (MAU),” the company wrote.

“Optimizing for DAU/MAU doesn’t properly motivate our team to create a product that people love. Here’s why: if we were motivated to grow DAU, we’d be incentivized to invest in a host of conventional growth hacks, viral mechanics, and marketing to drive up downloads. This direction doesn’t necessarily lead to a better product, or lead to success for Periscopers. We hold ourselves accountable to Time Watched as an organizational measure because it reflects the kernel of our product, and our core values.”

That being said, it also released a chart showing its growing DAUS, which are now approaching roughly two million:

Obviously, by all of the metrics Twitter has chosen to focus on, Periscope has been a success. But that is not the only big number it is racking up. It is also causing some headaches having to do with the issue of illegal material.

In just three months, Periscope racked up just under 1,400 requests for copyrighted material to be taken down, including over 800 requests in June alone, up from 541 in May. Vine, by comparison, had 2,405 requests in six months, and its highest total was 501 in March.

In all, Twitter complied with Periscope data take down requests 864 times, or 71%, in all, and 79% of the requests made in June. It complied with a total of 68% of Vine take down requests.

The issue of copyright material has been a sticking point for live-streaming apps ever since Periscope, and its competitors like Meerkat, burst onto the scene earlier this year. During the big fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao in May, both Meerkat and the Twitter-owned Periscope were both accused of not doing enough to remove unauthorized streams of the match.

(Image source: medium.com)