BIRD BRAIN
was migrated to the main Twitter platform in 2016, and Periscope as a standalone app was closed down in March 2021. But have you ever heard anyone ever talk about livestreaming on Twitter? Me neither... and that’s the ashes of Periscope. Twitch, though, now has 27 million daily visitors and 6 million creators – aka gamers – who stream every month (including my son, who swears by it). According to CNBC, today Twitch has an estimated standalone valuation of $15 billion. That’s equivalent to around 30% of Twitter’s current valuation. Twitter is what may have been a gold nugget the size of Mars. Vine is a big what-if for Twitter. Most likely, a whiff. If Twitter had a CEO with his eye on the ball – more on that below – perhaps today my son would be streaming his Fortnite exploits on Twitter instead of Twitch. Twitter would have a foothold in the $180 billion gaming industry (that’s more than movies and sports combined). It would also have an entrée into a youthful audience that’s more interesting than the demographic that hangs around Twitter, which my 17-year-old daughter – who is fluent in Snapchat and uses “Insta” when necessary – calls “that kind of social media thing that old people use.” MONEY LEFT ON THE TABLE, CASE NO. 2 The Periscope experience is Little League,
though, compared to the Vine episode, which belongs in the Hall of Fame of Missed Opportunities... Founded in June 2012, social media app Vine was purchased by Twitter four months later for a reported $30 million. With Vine, users could create and share six-second video clips – kind of like the video analog to the short- form text posts of Twitter (140 characters, increased to 280 in 2017). But Twitter proved (again) to be a poor steward of a great idea. As tech news website The Verge explained in October 2016, “Twitter’s mounting core business problems this year [have] all but ensured it [will] eventually be sold off or shuttered.” Vine was closed down for good in January 2017. In form, style, and product, Vine is very similar to TikTok, the video-sharing social- networking service owned by China’s ByteDance. TikTok, which initially allowed for 15-second videos (increased to 60 seconds last year... and then to three minutes last month), was launched in China in September 2016. TikTok went global a year later. Today, it has more than 1 billion active monthly users (including 130 million in the U.S., or almost 40% of the population). That’s around five times the number of current Twitter users . How much money did Twitter, with TikTok- before-TikTok Vine, leave on the table? In early August, the Financial Times reported that ByteDance is hoping to go public in Hong Kong later this year or in early 2022 (the crackdown on tech in China notwithstanding). The company will likely
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August 2021
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