Hasta La Creative!

Everyone who has an eye on social media is watching Meerkat right now, and with good reason. The gambit plied by the streaming video app’s creators — get Twitter influencers on board and try to scale quickly — is paying off. Launched on Feb. 27, Meerkat gained 28,000 users in its first week and reported the number of streams its users viewed doubled between March 5 and March 6 alone.

It even seems that Twitter unintentionally fueled a second wave of awareness of the app, with a move during SXSW to block Meerkat from its social graph — Meerkat can no longer show new users which of their Twitter followers are using the video-sharing service. While there are certainly practical reasons to block Meerkat (it eliminates noise on the social network), it may also be a move to stymie Meerkat from competing with Twitter’s just-launched live video-streaming service, Periscope.

Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin has suggested he’s more interested right now in growing the app’s user base than monetizing the operation. Well, he’s succeeding in the first part, and in time, his team will need to focus on revenue. A handful of brands have already started sharing videos on Meerkat. Rubin and his team will inevitably find themselves in the same position every other popular social app has found itself in at one point: How can they turn brands’ desire to engage with their audience into revenue, while preserving the basic integrity of the user experience?

Continue reading at AdAge.com