Meerkat is not dead. And neither is US tech media.
There is an article going around social media today, which is entitled “Meerkat is dying and it’s taking US tech media with it”. Fair play to the author. It’s a great headline. The article is below.
About three days after it received a lavish new funding round, Meerkat died an ugly and embarrassing death. It is hard…bgr.com
The author, Tero Kuittinen, states that the US tech media has been again guilty of overhyping an app like they did with Secret, only to have to crash after the hype. Secret was the darling of the tech media for a short while early last year before disappearing off the radar. Tero then states that the US tech media has totally lost credibility, since this has happened also to Meerkat.
I don’t agree with Tero at all here. Firstly, he is as guilty as anyone else of jumping on a bandwagon, since he is basing his article purely on three days of Meerkat dropping in the charts.
Also his comparison with Secret is very different. Secret was a copy of Whisper that crashed because they fundamentally changed their model, and turned off what brought people to the app in the first place.
Meerkat is different. Meerkat is just getting started and is the start of a completely new trend in social media. They haven’t done anything different to what they launched with. They just came up against a well funded competitor in Periscope, but lets see if Twitter continues to manage Periscope correctly. Meerkat’s independence could still benefit it in the long term.
Tero is missing the key point. Live streaming — a massive business on the web — is finally moving mobile. That is clear. The number of people setting up streams on Meerkat and Periscope are rapidly growing. A new major trend is occurring, and full credit to Meerkat for kicking it off.
I remember Daniel Graf showing me Kyte in the very early days, and I was very taken by the whole vision of live streaming. It would just take time for the networks to catch with the vision. But Daniel was right on with the vision. Justin.tv was also spot on with their vision, and pivoted to web based live streaming Twitch and became very successful. Give time to Meerkat to get it right, and also note that in Josh Elman and Greylock they have exceptional A+ grade investors who know how to make this a success.
The live streaming Kat is out of the bag. It’s going to happen. Meerkat still has a very good chance of being the leader. This is a new medium for consumers and it will take time. My feeling is that the writer of this article has jumped on a 3 day down trend too early, and could be as guilty of “jumping the gun” as the journalists he accuses of hyping Meerkat in the first place…
