What is Byte and should you care?

Byte seemed to take the social interwebs by storm by driving 1.3 million downloads in its first week. Launched by the creators of Vine (I suppose if at first you don't succeed, try, try again), the app appeared to have a rock solid first week. But, we have to dive deeper.

Let's start at the beginning, What is Byte? Technically, there are two companies. One is invisible teeth liners (winning the SEM budget) but the other is a video app from the creators of Vine. Remember Vine? It launched in 2012, grew a bit, was bought by Twitter, and died in 2016 #RIPVine. Byte the video app launched on January 24, 2020 and grew to 1.3 million users in its first week. The app allows users to make short form looping videos. Sounds a lot like Vine, which died, in 2016...

Should you care? Ok, so this is going to be the bulk of the article. I'm arguing that right now, it's not worth launching your brand on it, building a profile, grabbing your own name before someone else does. My $0.02: wait this one out. Here's why...

Disclosure: I am making assumptions based on one week of data, but bringing in historical trend data to back up the predictions.

Byte's launch data may seem impressive, but their growth in one week is still low compared to other channels

Yes, the app is still brand new, but we have to put Byte's launch growth into perspective. TikTok had 104MM downloads in January 2020 according to SensorTower. Assuming the downloads occur evenly throughout the month, that's about 23.3MM downloads in one week for TikTok, 18X that of Byte.

Snapchat, another video-based app, tracked roughly 5.3MM downloads per week in December 2019. Even Twitter, the app that bought Vine and was in existence when it launched, still tracked around 3.3MM downloads per week. If Byte wants to increase its growth rate to be on par with these other social platforms, it needs to drive a strong user experience. More on that later.

Since the app is brand new, it is aggressive to assume it can grow as quickly as other social networks currently are, so let's look at a different proxy. Let's say that Vine had super fans and all 200MM of them come back and join Byte. Then, could it compete?

Nope. If we look at this recycled chart from my article about TikTok and add Vine in (#RIPVine), we can see that even if Byte grew to 200MM users, they would still be only 1/4 the size of TikTok.

If any new social platform has a chance of survival, it absolutely has to capture global users

Of the 1.3MM Byte downloads in their first week, 70% were from the U.S., 7% were from Great Britain and 6% were from Canada. WhatsApp is the is the largest globally significant app, with 1.6B users across 180 countries. TikTok is in 150 countries. WeChat is a huge social app with 1.15B and is only in China, showing the potential of any app that is in China and could grow to other countries (or any app large internationally that is allowed to expand in China).

Byte is brand new, but if we look at Vine, we can assume that most of the focus will be on U.S. growth. It is hard to source data on this, but it seems Vine's primary markets were the U.S., the UK, Canada and Australia (with 3% reach in India). Meanwhile, TikTok's explosive growth right now is primarily due to growth in India, accounting for 31% of all downloads in December 2019. If Byte wants to be able to survive this social ecosystem, it absolutely has to create a strategy to drive global growth.

So, is the Byte platform unique enough to be ADDITIVE to the current number of social networks people are using, or will it need to REPLACE another channel?

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if we use data to try to predict trends if an app is really cool and providing a totally new, unique and exclusive user experience. Is Byte this type of app? I'd argue no.

According to eMarketer, the majority of social network users (54%) use 1-4 social platforms. If Byte is going to start being an additive platform, we can argue they can capture roughly 16% of the users (people using 6-7 channels). If Byte attempts to replace another social platform, they have a bigger bucket to play in, but they would have to provide a unique value.

Let's bring this back to the launch and ultimate failure of Vine.

When Vine launched in 2012-2013, they were playing in a much different pond. Boomerangs didn't exist, Stories didn't exist, Snapchat didn't exist, Facebook had just released autoplay video. Of course an app like Vine could take off - it was the first and basically only platform built on video alone.

Now, let's look at the year of the Byte launch. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, (likely) TikTok and WeChat all have over 1B global users. Facebook has Stories, Instagram has Stories, Snapchat built the concept of Stories and is launching AR all over the globe, and TikTok is a global phenomenon. Arguably, Byte has at least 4 direct competitors, all video creation platforms, the most direct being TikTok.

Is Byte different enough to take on TikTok? TikTok has a variety of features – 60 second videos, music licensed from major record labels, viral-friendly visual effects tools. Byte does not, only featuring some very basic video cutting tools. If Byte wants to grow, it will also have to significantly improve its functionality. Not only that, but Byte ran into significant issues at launch, including:

• Massive comment spam from bots
• Users grabbing celebrity usernames to try to get them before actual celebrities sign up
• Inappropriate adult content next to posts from children and inappropriate coronavirus jokes
• Launching 12+ but quickly realizing they had to change to 17+

The Bottom Line: Byte has an uphill battle.

What do you think?

Sources:

• TikTok: @influencersinthewild
• Digital Trends
• Byte launch