Newsletter 
If you’ve never heard of Periscope before, you’re forgiven, as it’s a burgeoning social network in a sea of other social network services. Among the others like Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, (really, the list can keep going) it can be easy to lose sight of how many different options there are out there for one to interact socially with other people over this thing we call the internet through a series of websites and apps. Despite all that, Periscope is growing pretty rapidly and and it’s already amassed a legion of users some 10 million strong while showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, it’s actually continuing to pick up steam.
This is and isn’t somewhat surprising. Periscope is a livestreaming application which allows users to record video while streaming the content live to the world or anyone who cares to watch through the Periscope app installed on their smartphones. Livestreaming is becoming more popular as a whole, so Periscope being rather popular and reaching a user base of mega proportions seems reasonable. The surprising part is that it’s owned by Twitter, which itself has been struggling a little as of late in regards to a stagnating user base. Hence the reason to likely introduce Periscope among a number of other changes to entice users to reengage with Twitters services in one way or another. But, back to Periscope.
In the time since the app launched (which was on iOS first about four months ago) Periscope’s “most important metric” which they see as time spent watched, has seen a pretty drastic increase. In addition to this there are about 2 million people actively using the Periscope app every day, and all those people account for what Periscope says is close to 40 years of video being watched on a daily basis. This bodes well for Periscope as they want to work towards building a “Netflix” like experience around time spent watched instead of trying to load up on users. They’re focusing on the bigger picture and making the community one that people want to interact with. Instead of adding features or functionality to draw in more users, Periscope has their eye on providing users with an experience that makes them want to keep coming back and watching more content, with an ultimate goal of presenting the opportunity for more success to those who create content on Periscope as well as watch content, which in the end also means more success for Periscope.
