I am also wondering what other tactics that companies like Socialcam may be deploying to get the wheels churning and users registered at such a rapid pace.Īfter doing some more digging, I was able to find some other folks who are wondering how the app has kickstarted numbers as big as they have and how the YouTube videos got there. The mobile experience is quite similar, as you can see: For an app that is supposedly about user generated content, surely that shouldn’t include old popular content from another service. I have a few questions about this, mostly centered around how YouTube content got onto the service in the first place. This type of manufactured virality was obviously well researched and tested, because it has clearly accelerated the growth of the service itself.īut the obviously weird part is that the video that Socialcam said was uploaded just a few days ago is over 2 years old, and even includes the exact same title as its YouTube counterpart (down to the lowercase i): Once you do that, it’s then plastered onto your Facebook Timeline and Newsfeed, and so on and so on. If you were to click the football video, you would be asked to register, if you’re not already a user, and then you’d be sent to this Socialcam page with a YouTube embed: There’s only one problem, there’s no way to upload YouTube videos to Socialcam, as it only pulls videos from your iOS device’s camera roll or live from your camera. However, when I accessed a video through Socialcam’s site via Facebook, social sharing magically turned back on, thus sharing this in the Newsfeed of my friends:Īs you can see, it clearly states that this video was uploaded to Socialcam. I’m also an app user and have social sharing off, so none of my video views or comments end up my timeline. It’s a practice similar to that of social readers used by Washington Post and it’s pretty annoying.
The way I stumbled onto this is that to view a Socialcam video in your Facebook Newsfeed, you have to sign up for the app, and it’s safe to say that these non-app users account for some of those 36M. Some of these videos show upwards of 6,000 Socialcam likes, which would surely equal many more social Open Graph actions on Facebook. A quick hop over to its website, and you can see that most of the “trending” videos are pretty old videos that are popular on YouTube. It appears that Socialcam is pulling in YouTube videos to its service and passing them off as content uploaded by its users. Unfortunately, that might not be the case here. For a user generated content app like Socialcam, you’d think that the content would come from its users. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that there’s great content for them to find. Once you have a lot of users inside of your app, it’s hard to keep them.
Once you get into the top five on the charts, you start experiencing organic growth due to the curiosity of those watching the charts for new apps to download.
SOCIALCAM YOUNG GAY VIDEOS FREE
Whilst FreeAppADay is normally only used by paid apps going free for a day (SocialCam is free), this type of non-organic growth isn’t “illegal”, and Apple doesn’t seem to mind. When we reported that Socialcam had hit the #1 free app position on Apple’s app store, I followed up quickly with the fact that the company was using a marketing service called FreeAppADay to drive itself up the charts.