Despite a splashy, star-studded coming out party in June and funding from celebrities and big name venture capital firms, the video chat start-up Airtime appears to be struggling, based on information published in The New York Times today. "So far its traffic appears to be little more than a trickle," reporter Jenna Wortham wrote.
Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning of Napster fame are the chat room's creators. Accessed through Facebook, Airtime allows you to chat, meet new people with similar interests and share videos.
In all fairness Airtime is just four months old. Parker told the paper a start-up needs at least a year to get its bearings, and hopes that Airtime's timing will catch a wave of rising popularity in video chatting.
"We could be a little too late or even a little too early," he told The Times. "But hopefully we'll be like Goldilocks and time it just right."
The start-up has already seen disruptions in its employee roster, including the loss of Fanning as CEO and of Eric Feng, the former CEO of Hulu who oversaw the site's construction.
In June, Parker and Fanning told Forbes the company had 30 employees, including 20 engineers; the number is now down to 12 based on The Times interview.
Upcoming changes for the company include a move to New York from San Francisco to take advantage of East Coast engineers and designers, the creation of a mobile version, and a version that will allow users to chat with multiple friends simultaneously.
Airtime would appear to be on sound financial footing having raised $33.5 million from top venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz, and celebrities Ashton Kutcher and Alicia Keyes.
Current data available through AppData, which provides data for Facebook, iOS and Android, indicates that Airtime has just 400 users a day and 10,000 over the course of a month.
"Nielsen and comScore, two independent analytics firms, both said that traffic to Airtime was so small that it did not yet register on their charts," The Times reported.
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