Houseparty Raises $50M For Entertainment Apps

To hold its own against offerings from Facebook and other established players, live video app Houseparty has reportedly raised a fresh $50 million.

As sources tell The Wall Street Journal, Sequoia Capital led the funding round.

Houseparty falls into what some are calling communitainment, or communication for the sole purpose of entertainment.

“This is (live) streaming to entertain each other on dedicated apps like live.ly, musical.ly and Houseparty, which have been App Store Top 100 strong holds for a while,” Simon Khalaf, SVP at Flurry parent Yahoo, noted in a recent report.

Khalaf largely attributed the healthy state of mobile apps to the rise of teens engaging in communitainment.

With no significant slowdown in sight, the time users spent consuming media in apps increased 38.5%, year-over-year, according to the Flurry report. It also found that the average U.S. consumer now spends 133 minutes per day consuming media in apps.

“It’s important to note that the daily 133 minutes/day spent is over and above everything else consumers do on mobile, including messaging, email, exchanging photos, using maps, shopping, etc.,” Khalaf noted.

The growth in 2015 came mostly from what Flurry characterizes as “entertainment” apps, such as YouTube, Netflix and Hulu, as well as social apps, like Facebook and Snapchat.

Thanks to teens becoming avid “streamers,” Live content is finally “happening” on mobile, according to Khalaf.

“Many still believe this is a fad, but it is hard to look at the data (and astounding growth) and not see a phenomenon taking hold,” he said.

Next story loading loading..