Keek social video app reaches 45 million users despite rival Vine

Keek, a popular video social network, announced Thursday that it now has 45 million users, more than doubling its base in the last four months.

The service gives users the ability to share with friends personal video snippets of up to 36 seconds in length. They can also share their Keek videos on other social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.

Isaac Raichyk, founder and chief executive of Toronto-based Keek, attributed the company’s growth to keeping things simple and making it easy for users to create a lot of content.

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“We have managed to solve one of the issues facing social video platforms, and that is getting users to create video,” he said. “It’s easy, it’s fast, no video editing, no gimmicks, no filtering tools. Just record yourself as you are.”

Keek has been able to grow despite playing in a heavily crowded field that also includes Tout, Viddy and, most recently, Vine, a video service launched by Twitter early this year that allows users to record and stitch together videos of up to six seconds in length.

Vine has grown in popularity over the last four months, picking up 13 million users in that time, but Raichyk says the growth of Twitter’s video service hasn’t hurt Keek. He said people seem to be using both services, as evidenced by Vine’s growth and the 24 million users that Keek has added since its new rival launched.

“We don’t see it as a factor,” he said of Vine. “We don’t see any effect on our growth.”

Raichyk said he expects Keek’s user base, which has created more than 18 million videos in the last four months, to keep growing, and believes social video in general will flourish.

“We believe the next two years belong to social video,” he said.

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