Airtime, Sean Parker's social video network, is suffering from a stagnant user base.
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Despite $33 million in funding and celebrity endorsements from the likes of Jimmy Fallon and Julia Louis Dreyfus, Airtime has struggled to gain traction since its launch four months ago. So far, it's attracted around 10,000 monthly active users, according to analytics site, AppData.
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In an interview with The New York Times, however, Parker denied that Airtime was faltering. The startup impresario said there was a dedicated group of people who regularly used the service, and that it's still too early to make conclusions.
"This is a ridiculously early stage for a company," he told the newspaper last Monday. "It takes six to 12 months to get things up and running."
Parker declined to provide specifics on Airtime's user numbers, saying only that early traffic was "very compelling." He and other executives at the company suggested that AppData's statistics were inaccurate. But analytics firms Nielsen and comScore both said Airtime's traffic "was so small that it did not yet register on their charts," The Times reported.
Parker and Shawn Fanning -- his fellow co-founder of peer-to-peer filing sharing service Napster -- launched Airtime in June. Described as Chatroulette without the nudity," the service leverages users' Facebook accounts and interest graphs to connect them with friends and strangers via video chat. When users grant Airtime access to their public information, it searches for nearby chat partners who have similar interests or who are friends of friends.
This story originally published on Mashable here.