The first time hundreds of millions of people heard about Bitstrips was when its customised comic strips started appearing in their Facebook news feeds in October, en masse.
Facebook 'Bitstrips' No More Users of Facebook may be familiar with 'Bitstrips,' cartoons that some used posted on their pages, and would appear on their friends' public feed like other posts. Unfortunately, it seems the Bitsrip fun is over. Someone who was a regular user posted this on her page on April 25. Mar 29, 2016 The question now will be what Snapchat does with the Bitstrips avatar and comic maker, and the Bitmoji personalized emoji keyboard apps. Snapchat could shut them down or curtail their extendability to make Bitmoji exclusive to its platform. However, that. Bitmoji is your own personal emoji. Create an expressive cartoon avatar, choose from a growing library of moods and stickers - featuring YOU! Put them into any text message, chat or status update.
Bitstrips explained its growth to users with, yes, a comic strip. That included teachers in North America starting to use Bitstrips in the. As happened to video-sharing app Viddy last year.
Bitstrips has since gone on to become the second most-downloaded iOS app in the world in November, with the Canadian company raising $3m of funding just as its app topped app store charts around the world. But who is Bitstrips, why did it become so popular so quickly, and what will it do next?
A chat with chief executive and creative director Jacob Blackstock (known as 'BA' to friends and colleagues) provides some answers hinting that Bitstrips may be more than just the latest short-lived app craze. Starting with the fact that there's a longer backstory than you might think.
'I've been drawing since I was a little kid. I started taking animation classes when I was six years old, using stop-motion animation and Super-8 film,' says Blackstock. 'My mom has boxes and boxes of my old sketchbooks and comics! I would either draw comics in class instead of paying attention, or draw comics for my school projects. So I'd either get in trouble for doing them or get good grades depending on the situation, but comics have been a lifelong passion.'
Blackstock was also a voracious comics reader and cartoons viewer from an early age, falling in with a group of close friends who shared these interests, and would gather after school to read comics, but also draw their own, selling some of them at the local comics store.
'As we got older, in high school we'd really use comics as a way to interact. We'd put each other into comics to make each other laugh, to embarrass each other, or to get each other into trouble,' he says, adding that even when Blackstock and his co-founders had jobs, they'd still fax 'embarrassing pictures' of one another as pranks.
'We were always engaged in what you could call the analogue version of Bitstrips,' he says. Blackstock spent 18 months developing an animated TV series which wasn't made, then spent three years making it himself, frame-by-frame, funding it by running animation workshops for children. Next, he set up a creative studio with those friends, with the idea for Bitstrips born in 2007, and launching as a standalone website in 2008.
The idea was pretty much the same as the mobile app that's been so popular in 2013: people created an avatar of themselves, then customised various comic-strip 'scenes' created by Bitstrips to create their own pithy stories, regardless of drawing skills or digital abilities.
“We kind of saw it as YouTube for comics. The technology had gotten to a point where we could share the fun that we’d been having with the rest of the world, and that might actually create some really amazing results,” says Blackstock. “We basically gave people a character-builder tool and a comic-builder tool, and let them go nuts. Which they did! We saw all these creative uses for it: people doing things with the tools that we’d made that we’d never even thought would be possible.”
That included teachers in North America starting to use Bitstrips in the classroom, leading the company to launch a version called Bitstrips for Schools. That's the second surprising thing about Bitstrips: its roots are as much in education as in entertainment, with its software licensed to all publicly-funded schools in its home province of Ontario thanks to a partnership with its Ministry of Education.
“Kids were getting really engaged with their schoolwork. It was a combination of the fact that they’re using this medium that they love – comics – which is really visual, appealing and expressive, and also the fact that they had the avatars in their work. They weren’t just communicating through comics, they were communicating through their own avatars,” says Blackstock.
“It’s thrilling, the idea that this gets kids excited about writing and reading. And we’ve heard incredible stories about kids who were having difficulties with the standard mode of writing text on blank paper, who then became prolific comic authors. We’ve also heard about autistic kids who were barely able to communicate, who were able to find a voice through Bitstrips. It’s been a really rewarding aspect of the tools we created.”
Bitstrips for Schools was also rewarding enough financially to fund the company as it worked on a new version of the main website, retooling it as a Facebook application which launched in 2012. By then, though, Blackstock and his colleagues had already realised that the service needed to go mobile.
“As soon as we launched the Facebook app, we were working on the mobile app, which we spent another year developing, and finally finished at the end of this summer,” says Blackstock. “We launched on Android at the end of August, then on iOS on 1 October. And two weeks after the iOS launch, it reached this tipping point and went mega viral.”
The proof of that was in hundreds of millions of people's Facebook news feeds in October and November. Until the mobile apps launched, people had created 10m avatars using Bitstrips' website and Facebook app – this is a rough measure of registered users, specifically those who'd signed up and created their character – but in the two months after its iOS and Android launch, another 30m were created.
Bitstrips isn't giving out more detailed statistics for now – for example on how many of those 30m new users are still active – but this chart published by Inside Facebook based on analytics from industry database AppData, shows the jump in monthly active users:
The huge spike came as a surprise to Bitstrips: “We were in testing mode. We thought of it as a stealth launch where we could find the bugs and put in more features, before officially launching it,” says Blackstock. “We never told anyone about it, never spent a penny on marketing, yet all of a sudden it was just exploding everywhere.”
Mobile analytics company App Annie claims that Bitstrips was the second most-downloaded app globally on Apple’s App Store in November, behind only MomentCam – a different personalised-comics app – but ahead of YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp and other big apps.
“It feels like one of those ‘overnight successes’ that was actually the product of seven years of toil,” says Blackstock, who notes that the viral effect – the average Bitstrip user has 50 friends who’ve created an avatar using the app – has been a big factor in the recent spike. “We see this as the app that turns your circle of friends into your own personal Springfield,’ he says, referencing The Simpsons.
What next? Continuing to feed this community, avoiding the Draw Something trajectory of burning brightly on the app store then fading away, and actually making money from the app. On the former count, Bitstrips launches four new comic strips a day, as well as a recent batch of more than 150 Christmas-themed strips for users to customise and share. More than 2,000 scenes are already available in the app, with plans to continue this approach.
“We’re able to do things that are really timely: when there are current events, we can have a comic about that within 24 hours. It’s a way for our users to participate in news, media and memes,” says Blackstock. “When the royal baby was born, we had a comic out that day in which you were the baby, and Prince William was holding you up Lion King style.”
This may sound like novelty territory, but the ability to respond to topical events – or more accurately, to give people the tools to respond to them – is one of Bitstrips’ most interesting features, and part of a wider trend for tools (often apps) that remove the need to have, say, Photoshop skills to create and share visual content.
“It’s not just about jokes: it’s a really powerful way to communicate,” says Blackstock. “People are using this as a political platform for example. Whatever your message is, a picture is worth a thousand words.” Bitstrips is already fielding calls from some celebrities too, wondering how they can work with the company.
Bitstrips App
What about the second challenge: avoiding becoming another flash-in-the-pan app? Especially if Bitstrips becomes known as “that annoying comics app” by people who don’t really like the strips, and specifically don’t like dozens of them clogging up their Facebook feeds?
Bitstrips can't stop your friends and family over-sharing, but it does seem aware of the risks. It has already tweaked the app so users aren’t forced to share their comics to Facebook every time, for example: they can now choose to share them within Bitstrips alone, or via other means like Twitter and email.
“We’re working on more stuff that’s really going to improve the experience of reading these comics within the app, receiving and even interacting with your friends’ content,” says Blackstock. He doesn’t talk about other forthcoming features, but I wonder if animation – moving Bitstrips – are on the company’s roadmap too: cartoons in the TV sense of the word, as well as the comic-strip sense.
The third challenge is how Bitstrips makes money, given that it doesn’t currently charge for the app or its scenes, nor does it carry advertising. In-app purchases are one likely avenue – premium scenes perhaps, in the same way that messaging apps like Line offer a mixture of free and paid stickers for people to send to friends.
Whatever Happened To Bitstrips
Premium scenes might also be a way for Bitstrips to partner with celebrities, film studios and other popular brands – although it might also be able to charge brands to sponsor free scenes in the same way that websites like BuzzFeed sell “native advertising” that look like normal articles on the site.
“We’ve thought about those things, and we do have pretty detailed ideas. But we are really focused on growth and improving the experience right now,” says Blackstock, mirroring the words of other rapidly-growing-app entrepreneurs before him (see: Instagram, Snapchat, etc). “We still have a lot of work to do on the app to get it to where we want it to be before we start to look at those things. We don’t like apps that do things that detract from the experience, so we’ll make sure whatever we do is really true to the brand, and adds value.”
There are plenty of dangers for Bitstrips in the months ahead. Although it's broadening the ways people can share their comics with friends beyond Facebook, its reliance on the social network for viral growth so far puts it at risk if that virality is suddenly checked by a change in the news feed algorithm, as happened to video-sharing app Viddy last year.
Bitstrips On Facebook
'Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile,” announced Facebook in a blog post on 2 December. “This means that high quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently.”
Bitstrips will have to negotiate the ups and downs of news feed changes, but Blackstock says his company wants to prove that personalised, socially-shared comic strips are much more than a viral annoyance. In fact, he's got big ambitions for comics as tools of self-expression.
“If you think about comics as a communication tool – this medium for self-expression – that’s a no-brainer for people making comics on their own already, but when you think about it as something that could be accessible to everyone, it’s potentially revolutionary. It’s like giving people typewriters for the first time,” he says.
“Comics are this visual language that combines images, symbols, composition… When you have characters conveying things about emotion, it’s more like the way humans naturally communicate face-to-face, with facial expressions, body language, hand gestures. It’s a really powerful medium of expression, especially when you combine this aspect of identity into it – you and your friends – it goes beyond just being a medium for expression and becomes a really powerful social mechanism as well.”
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This article was edited on Friday 20 December to reflect the fact that Ontario is a province, not a state.