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)
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Startup/Business
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
