Viddy

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

~ the obituary ~

viddy's whole short life happened inside facebook's feed, and that is also where it died. its peak years line up with my late twenties, when i was already an engineer watching the mobile-video wars from ankara rather than joining them. i never posted a viddy clip. i read about the valuation instead, because for about a year the valuation was the story.

viddy came out of los angeles around 2011, a phone app for recording a short clip and pushing it out with a filter on it. the pitch that stuck was the instagram for video, which in early 2012 was the kind of line that opened checkbooks. it raised thirty million dollars that may and got talked about as a company worth several hundred million.

the growth was real and also borrowed. viddy plugged into facebook's open graph, so watching a clip could auto-post to a friend's feed, and every one of those posts pulled more people in. at the top it claimed around fifty million users and half a million new signups a day. back then that looked like a rocket.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

what made viddy huge in 2012 is easy to name. facebook was surfacing its auto-posts aggressively, so the app got enormous free distribution just by existing inside the feed. that is why the signup numbers looked the way they did. a lot of that traffic was people clicking through from a friend's wall, not people who had gone looking for a video app.

~ the slide ~

then facebook adjusted how those auto-shared stories showed up, and viddy's borrowed distribution evaporated almost overnight. the app that had grown on the feed now could not reach anyone through it. at the same time twitter shipped vine in early 2013, and instagram added video that june, so the short-video category filled with better-backed options right as viddy lost its engine.

the company tried to pivot toward working with brands and creators, but the momentum was gone. fullscreen, a youtube-network company, bought viddy for about twenty million dollars, well under what it had once been worth on paper.

~ what carried over ~

viddy is a clean lesson in building on someone else's platform. the thing that made it grow was a facebook feature, and the thing that killed it was facebook changing that feature. on november 4 2014 the app came out of the app store and google play, and the service shut down on december 15. to be honest, the mechanic it chased, short filtered video that spreads through a social feed, did win. it just won for tiktok, years later, and for none of the apps that got there first.

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