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Airtime is still here.
A month is gone since Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning launched their new startup, Airtime. Thanks to AppData, a few stats about the super expected startup, whose aim was to let people meet in a different way, are out and we are willing to analyze them with you. As Sean Parker stated, with Facebook we have a platform with which users meet people they know, now it is time to let the people who don’t know each other know through other services.
With a deeply integration in the open graph, Airtime is constantly using Facebook to get data, friends and interests. This lets the application understand who you should meet and why you should have that kind of video chat.
As you can see from the graph, Airtime has reached 200,000 monthly users in the first month. This means that there are 10,000-9,000 daily active users on the service each day.
With an initial peak at 30,000 daily active users, the app has slow down to 10,000 users per day. Although this could be considered a delusional beginning, this is the best way to understand how to improve the service day by day. It is not always easy to get people onto a new new service and the most difficult part is to encourage them to use a service like Airtime.
Airtime is not like Facebook, you go there if you just want to hangout with new people (which could sound odd to most of us). At the same level, the app could embrace another good slice of the market from people who already met somewhere or who are already friends on Facebook. In fact the good thing about Airtime is that it perfectly fits in your social graph, letting invite your friends and chatting with them.
Moreover you don’t need any program, it is just you the browser and the camera. This leads to a good and an affordable way to interact with the people you care about, but the market is too much overcrowded at the moment to fully succeed in just a month. Skype is too strong to be defeated at this time.
People, who have Skype, use it. People, who don’t have Skype, use Facebook (thanks to Skype). People, who love Google, use Google Plus.
Sean Parker probably thought to get the market that ChatRoulette previously had, but that can not be achieved. The 90% of people who use ChatRoulette wants to show their genitals and watch other people naked. This was forbidden on Airtime from day first. As many people reported, the team developed a special software to understand if what it is in the video is a head or something else. If you try to use it while showing your penis, the service will probably shout off.
This other image shows Airtime weekly usage. It is not so great as we expected, but as we previously said Airtime needs time to expand and to improve its own product. We can not judge a startup from day two, we can judge it from a year of hard working.
Shawn Fanning is going to work hard in the next months and we are here ready to see what he is up to.
