[hornbaker]

SocialCam's main competitor, Viddy, just raised at a $370M valuation, and some data[1] show SocialCam at around 2X the traction of Viddy (post-sharkfin for both). The modest scale of this acquisition is not the kind of comp you want to see if you're Viddy, especially with their Series B terms[2].

I'm curious what the HN crowd thinks – has mobile social video peaked, or has it just not been done well enough yet?

1. http://i.imgur.com/ncvPr.png 2. http://www.businessinsider.com/viddy-series-b-terms-2012-5

[brackin]

Nearly all of social cam's traffic came from the timeline. Viddy is just content uploaded by me or you, so I'd venture to say most of their traffic is real but SocialCam was embedding YouTube videos of women in bikini's, funny clips, etc and whenever you watched one of them it would post on your Facebook timeline, just watching a video made you a user. This is why half of my Facebook friends seemed to have SocialCam accounts but not one of them had actually posted a video.

It's not sustainable and they knew it, Facebook will eventually kill off this kind of traffic so they sold out before the wave completely fizzles out.

Great job to them, was the right decision.

[joering2]

Well, isn't the image you provided [1] answering your question already? It has been a trend for a while (hard to determine how organic since both companies spammed the heck out of Facebook wall) and now when the dust settled, there is nothing left behind.

In this example a large corporation agreed to be the one to turn the lights off (vide Zynga purchase of DrawSomething -- nothing can save the dropping audience #s) and so congratulation to PG and SocialCam team: selling rotten eggs is becoming hard to do.