Yesterday Facebook revealed some data about how great Timeline integration has been for video apps. “Early results show that as video clips go viral, so do the video apps and websites integrated with Open Graph,” Facebook said via its developer blog.
It seems like social video is experiencing a renaissance, and app developers for Web and mobile alike have been turning their attention to the space. It’s been somewhat glazed over, and perhaps earlier growth was stunted by the quick and incredible rise of photo-sharing platforms that corresponded to the consumer smartphone market’s evolution. But recently it’s been getting some more attention: Viddy was quick to corner the “Instagram for video” analogy (even though creator JJ Aguhob told me at SXSW that this is an “easy analog”) and Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning’s Airtime should launch relatively soon. Companies that have been in the video business have also taken the social plunge: Ustream was one of the first to create a video app for Timeline.
And while it might not be surprising that video apps getting the Timeline treatment are doing well (it’s been the same story for all apps under the Open Graph banner), it’s certainly worth noticing. “In under two months we’ve seen our monthly unique users grow from under 100,000 to now 920,000,” Viddy co-founder and CEO Brett O’Brien told me. “Over 1.5 million people have joined Viddy since the Timeline launch, and the majority of new users are accessing Viddy via Facebook and then in turn sharing Viddys they’ve made and viewed on Facebook.”
O’Brien says the numbers exceeded the startup’s expectations. And the company has also noticed the increased interest in socializing video. “Both consumer behavior and smartphone capabilities are driving the growth of mobile video, which is expected to be 75-percent of all traffic by 2015,” he says. “2011 was the year of sharing photos with services like Instagram, and 2012 already seems to be the year of video.”
