Bitstrips

» see bitstrips.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

in late 2013 i was around 29, working as an engineer, with a facebook feed that was mostly turkish friends from university and a handful of foreign colleagues from earlier jobs. that november the feed turned into bitstrips for about ten weeks. everyone had built a small cartoon version of themselves dressed in approximately the right clothes and was using the bitstrips facebook app to generate weekly templated comics about going to the gym or sitting at a desk on a monday morning. it was the same pattern across turkish and american friends, with the brazilian colleagues catching on the same week. for that window bitstrips was the thing my feed was about.

the company was older than the viral moment by six years. bitstrips was founded in toronto in 2007 by jacob blackstock and a small team as a web tool for making personalized comics for use in classrooms and on personal blogs. the original product was a flash-based comic editor with a stock library of poses and props plus a small set of backdrops. you built an avatar, picked a template, dropped a friend's avatar into the scene with yours, then added captions before sharing the strip. for the first six years that ran as a small steady-state web service with a small enthusiast user base. then in october 2013 the company launched a facebook app version that bundled the comic-maker with feed sharing, and the avalanche started.

the cultural moment was short. by late january 2014 bitstrips comics were the example everyone used when they wanted to talk about facebook feed pollution. the company shipped weekly templates faster than the audience could keep up. repetition exhaustion set in and the comics gradually stopped appearing in feeds. by mid-2014 bitstrips was a small business again with a strong avatar engine and not much else.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the facebook moment is not the part of bitstrips that mattered to the long term. the part that mattered is what happened next. in late 2014 the company launched a separate app called bitmoji that took the avatar engine out of the comic strip and let users paste their cartoon self into messaging apps as stickers. the comic format dropped away. what remained was just the avatar, stripped of context, ready to be embedded in someone else's chat thread.

bitmoji was an immediately better product than the bitstrips facebook app had been. the comic-strip format was a constraint that limited use to weekly facebook posts. the bitmoji sticker format was free to be dropped into imessage or whatsapp or any other channel that supported sticker imports. by late 2015 bitmoji was downloading steadily and blackstock was talking publicly about avatar-as-identity. the bigger platforms were starting to notice.

~ what it became ~

on march 25, 2016 techcrunch reported that snapchat had acquired bitstrips for a reported $100 million. snap later disclosed in february 2017 sec filings that the actual purchase price was closer to $64.2 million, with the headline number inflated by reporters at the time. either way the deal closed in march 2016, the bitstrips brand was retired publicly on july 19, 2016 when snap formally announced the acquisition, and bitmoji moved inside the snapchat platform.

what followed was one of the more successful identity acquisitions in social-app history. bitmoji as a snap product became the dominant cross-platform avatar in 2017 and hit number one on the us ios charts during the back-to-school period that fall. apple's own end-of-year list named it the most-downloaded app worldwide on ios for 2017. snap put bitmoji avatars inside snap maps and chat bubbles, then extended the same avatars into friend lists across the entire app. the avatar concept that bitstrips had built quietly for a decade became the snap identity layer.

~ the funny part ~

the bitstrips comic format itself is what people actually remember and not the part snap bought. the avatars that snap absorbed are now embedded in a single chat platform, while the actual bitstrips comics on facebook in november 2013 were the more visible cultural event by an order of magnitude. ask any thirty-year-old who was on facebook in 2013 about bitstrips and they will remember the comics. ask them about bitmoji and they will probably say it is something in snapchat. the comics died and the avatars survived. the brand that built both went away in between.

the technical residue is the bitstrips.com domain, which still redirects to bitmoji.com nine years later. the comic editor is gone. blackstock stayed at snap for several years as head of bitmoji and is credited on the avatar engine that snap shipped in 2020 as bitmoji 3d for app clip support. it is the longest second life of any acquired social app from that era.

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