With 230M active users, Talking Tom Cat apps are bigger than Twitter | Hacker News Reader

With 230M active users, Talking Tom Cat apps are bigger than Twitter

theguardian.com

45 pointshepha197941 comments

Everyone seems to be missing the irony of the situation.

Twitter despite loosing $500M a year etc etc is an almost $30B market cap that is bigger than a lot of more traditional companies with a business model!

Whereas, Outfit7 is a 20-something person operation that is brining in millions in recurring revenue every month (200K on Xmas Day 2011).

Twitters revenue is more than half a billion a year. Outfit7 is nowhere near this.

Combined with the global application of twitter versus a children's game, the potential value is far far higher with twitter.

Your logic is akin to me saying my small company made six figures this year, so I'm worth more than twitter.

potential value

Sorry but that makes me chuckle. If I had a nickle for all of the "potential value" calculations of now dead businesses, I'd have a lot of "actual value" in my bank account.

Are we so far removed from the last crash that potential value is still considered equal to actual cash money?

That's the thing. The value is not "potential" as it would have been when Twitter was still a startup. As of right now the company has an about 30B market cap ... as big as Raytheon, for example, and bigger than LinkedIn, Northrop Grumman Corporation, BEIERSDORF, Tesla and T-mobile.

Share price drops (which can happen for many reasons) and that market cap looks similarly foolish. Market cap is only as impressive as the product or services the company actually offers. The companies you list have real products for sale in mature markets. Twitter is still trying to figure out how to monetize effectively in a very fickle market (free social networking) .. I don't think Northrop Grumman is having trouble figuring out how to make money selling fighter jets.

I know I am trivialising the issue. I am just annoyed with Twitter having a ridiculous market cap while posting massive losses. It is, after all, a 140 character messaging platform.

ExxonMobil turns black goo into a flammable liquid. That, said ExxonMobil is able to prove that people are willing to a pay lot of money for that flammable liquid, and Twitter can't say that about its product.

That black goo has to be found, drilled, refined, transported, sold to customers for actual dollars. Whereas twitter hasn't pretty much changed in years even though it has 2000+ salaried employees.

Where do you see Twitter "loosing $500M a year etc etc is an almost $30B market"?[0]

[0]- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7188006

They have 14 apps, and I suspect they may have arrived at this number by adding together the active user counts for each app. So, if I have all 14 apps, then I might count as 14 unique active users.

Apart from that in my case my 2 year old loves these apps so I've bought them in 3 app stores and installed on 5 devices.

OTOH, they're talking about monthly actives, meaning that you'd really only be counted 14 times if you played all fourteen games during that period.

Secondly, from a reach perspective it matters whether these are really unique, but when talking about immediate revenue (or potential for revenue) not as much.

Sure thats correct. Also People have multiple twitter accounts (I agree ratio may be smaller).

I find it interesting that I've had a physical 'Talking Tom' (as in, a 15 inch tall plastic cat in a pose on its hind legs with a keypad for a chest) for at least 2 years. And no idea it was an app.

It cost about $5 in a local market. Pressing #9 on the keypad allows lagged realtime speech playback (from whatever it hears) accentuated in tone and speed.

For the tactile touch, the physical one is great for young kids.

The nieces have these apps installed. The new "My Talking Tom" is essentially a Tamigotchi with in-app purchases (if anyone is old enough to remember those toys..)

Feed it, play with it, and it grows up and demands ever-pricier food. We haven't found the point yet where the cost of the food exceeds the coins you make by just playing the game, but I expect those curves intersect.

The "free to play" model seems exceptionally seedy when applied to kids games.

  > Larry the Lizard isn't feeling so hot.
  > 
  > [Add Money] [Attend Funeral]

At least Tamagotchis only demanded time.

> if anyone is old enough to remember those toys..

Ouch. Are we at this point now where kids born in the mid 80's are "old"?

Soon you're going to be telling me kids these days have newfangled devices that have better graphics than my yellow X-Men LCD handheld game!

I think I may still have a Tamagotchi and Digimon sitting around in my basement.

There is a classic rock station here that plays Nirvana. Classic rock, 90's music. wtf is that?

"classic" in that context refers to the track being of an outstanding quality that it's appeal would be timeless, rather than the age of the track at this current point in time.

It's a little bit like how Classical radio stations play modern compositions. It's the Classical style rather than age.

No one thinks that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_rock

This is the definition that people expect when they hear 'Classic Rock' -

"In the United States, the classic rock format features music ranging generally from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, primarily focusing on hard rock and blues rock popularized in the 1970s"

Also, Nirvana is grunge or Alternative, not Classic Rock.

I think you're getting too hung up on genre names and missing the bigger picture.

I used to see the same thing in the electronic music scene. Eventually it lead to half a dozen different subgenres defined primarily by the tone of the kick drum. It was nuts.

My point being this is a commercial radio station, normal rules of music snobbery don't apply. Thus their definition of the station is simply popular guitar music that isn't being hammered on the teeny stations nor offends any major demographics. And grunge or not, Nevermind was a popular album with "poppy rocky singles".

By loosening their definition of "classic rock" they're attempting to appeal to the largest number of people. Thus my original statement stands.

Similarly, "modern rock" stations frequently play music from the late 60s and 70s. It's just what people expect.

Well, kids born in the mid 80's are no longer early-twenty-somethings, which is a major target demographic of startups (i.e. major target demographic of this website)

I, oh, time to go for a run I guess.

--Logan

The Talking Tom and Friends apps aren’t just for kids

Really? These apps are also directed at adults? I find that exceptionally hard to believe.

My GF is 29 and she also uses this app. Although I find it hard to believe too:)

Part of the reason is because this is one of those apps that annoys the hell out of you to "upgrade" and get more crap. I uninstalled them pretty quick.

The apps are all basically the same with different characters, and they're annoying even if your kids enjoy them for a bit.

Selling virtual money to children...

Talking Tom Cat versus Twitter has to be one of the worst comparisons I've seen in a while. As a small curiosity at the bottom of this article... fine. As part of the headline and lede? Come on, it's ridiculous.

Honest question: Why?

(Full disclosure: long term twitter naysayer here : )

Twitter is not competing with that cat. At all. The comparison tells us absolutely nothing meaningful at all: you can be wildly successful and have less users than TTC, or you can have way more users than TTC and be doing terribly. In no way, shape, or form should TTC be used as a measuring stick for Twitter's value or success. Again, I think it's sort of an interesting statistic, but featuring it so prominently is designed to hold the comparison up as something Very Meaningful & Insight™... which it just isn't, and I can't begin to fathom the rationale for why it would be.

My daughter loves Tom and Angela.

She sings all their love songs and I know them very well for I repeat them silently while coding all day.

The two key factors to these (IMHO crappy apps) are the fact that the animal echos what the child says in a high-pitch funny sounding voice, and when "hit" it reacts. Rinse, repeat (a million times) and you have a hit for the 2-4 year old age range.

Wish there was an app that did away with the "hitting" feature but it is what it is.

Can someone help me estimate the valuation of Outfit7? I can't seem to find it anywhere. Many thanks in advance!

I doubt you'll find it since it's a private Slovenian company.

The founder may be Slovenian, but the company is not.

Looks like it is registered in Cyprus.

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/sn...

-----

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...

This article states they were first registered in Slovenia with the name Ekipa7 then they moved the company to Cyprus with the name Outfit7.

Fun fact. The founders of Outfit7 went from nothing to richest Slovenians in about two years! I always like to use them as an example when people from my home country say that the only way to get rich is by being a crock.

Maybe this will be the impetus the Guardian needs to stop reporting random twitter posts as though they were news.

Or maybe we'll start seeing "breaking news" on cat activities.

I don't see the connection. It is true that there are relatively few Twitter users, but those users tend to be exactly the kind of people that make news - politicans, celebrities, etc.

So if anything it makes even more sense that news outlets would use Twitter as a source.

My take on these numbers is producers versus consumers.

Tweets are production, however limited. Or for push/pull model, Talking Tom is all pull, Twitter has some push.

Maybe it will make them start getting Talking TomCat to do their video segments.

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