Twitter spent $100 million dollars to acquire Periscope in 2015, betting that personal video live-streaming would be a great sidekick to its primary social medium service.
Alas, the video sharing platform is slated to go down in early 2021 and by March no more activity on Periscope will be taking place.
Twitter seems to like wasting money on video apps: It acquired Vine in 2012 for a reported $30 million and shut it down 5 years later – the same length of time as with Periscope.
Do you see a pattern there?
The domain Vine.CO contains an archive of the platform’s web site and it no longer receives updates as of 2019. Is this what will happen with the domain Periscope.TV, we wonder.
Adam Dicker on Periscope
It seems that Adam Dicker’s promo videos will have to move from Periscope to YouTube or another video sharing platform to retain all of his wisdom on “how to sell a domain name.”
Do a segment on TWITCH.TV
or PLUTO.TV
It’s probably the same tactic which Twitter is now employing that Facebook is aggressively uses: Develop a similar company/product in house and then nudge the owner of the smaller competitor that there is huge backing and see if they “want” to sell to only afterward collect as many new users from that platform to convert to the main one and integrate (much like Facebook/IG/etc. are now), later to close shop.
There is essentially no product with social media. The users are the product.
Twitter (and Facebook) acquire what they seem to be competitors in order to add more to their product at a lesser cost per user than traditional advertising. You can buy a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl for $5.6 million dollars (2020) in the hopes of a lot of new users or you can buy those users outright from an existing company and know what you are getting with your money, which could be worth way more than what $5.6 could get you per user.