Meerkat usage has dropped due to competition from Periscope, poor stream recommendations, and because it's no longer featured on the App Store
Here's why Meerkat's popularity is suddenly plunging — After bursting onto the scene through the trend-spotting site Product Hunt and winning …
Context & Ripple Effects
Meerkat rode [[a:none|Product Hunt]] buzz to become the breakout livestreaming app of early 2015 — but its distribution was always borrowed, running on top of Twitter's social graph with no owned network of its own.
The collapse reported here was set up weeks earlier: Twitter launched rival Periscope and began pushing celebrities and publishers off Meerkat, and within days daily tweets to Periscope streams settled near Meerkat's level after Periscope's explosive launch week. Losing App Store featuring and weak stream recommendations compounded a platform disadvantage Meerkat could not fix.
First-order effects
- Meerkat's growth engine stalls on three fronts at once: users defecting to Periscope, poor stream recommendations suppressing engagement among those who stay, and loss of App Store featuring cutting off new-user discovery.
- Twitter's pressure campaign against celebrity and publisher Meerkat usage removes the marquee broadcasters whose streams drove the app's initial virality.
Second-order effects
- Periscope's win locks in Twitter's control of the livestreaming category, forcing any challenger to build an audience independent of Twitter's graph rather than piggyback on it.
- App Store featuring emerges as a decisive swing factor in consumer-app battles, raising the stakes for developers who depend on Apple's editorial placement for distribution.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward livestreaming consolidating inside platforms that own both the social graph and the distribution channel — a structural lesson Life On Air itself absorbed when it later pulled Meerkat from the App Store entirely to chase its group video chat app Houseparty, after first ditching the livestream to chase a video social network.
The trend: Consumer apps built atop another platform's social graph are being displaced by vertically integrated rivals as soon as the platform owner enters their category.