Periscope, Twitter’s live-streaming video app, now has 10 million accounts.
Periscope founder Kayvon Beykpour jumped on a Periscope stream today to announce that the company reached the milestone on August 2, about four months after its launch in March. The app had 1 million users after 10 days.
A more significant milestone, Beykpour said, is the total time users watch Periscope content daily. The Periscope CEO said users now watch an average of 40 years of live streams every day. That total only counts iOS and Android; streams on the Web are not counted in the stat. Viewing of replays is not counted, either.
“There’s no better metric that illustrates whether people like and are engaged with using Periscope,” Beykpour said.
In a blog post on Medium expanding on its strategy, Periscope said time watched is a proxy for active user growth. The company didn’t release a figure for daily active users but published a graphic that shows DAUs at about 1.8 million at the beginning of August.
The blog post then reiterated why the company isn’t focusing on daily or monthly use:
Optimizing for DAU/MAU doesn’t properly motivate our team to create a product that people love. Here’s why: if we were motivated to grow DAU, we’d be incentivized to invest in a host of conventional growth hacks, viral mechanics, and marketing to drive up downloads. This direction doesn’t necessarily lead to a better product, or lead to success for Periscopers. We hold ourselves accountable to Time Watched as an organizational measure because it reflects the kernel of our product, and our core values.
During his Periscope stream, which can be viewed for the next 23 hours or so, Beykpour also took questions from the audience, including some feature requests. He said the company is considering adding fast-forward functionality for replays of streams and focusing on better tools for fighting spam and abuse. He also said it is working on making chats on streams with a large number of viewers more readable and looking for ways to better display Periscope events on Twitter.
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