Social Video Network Keek Passes 45M Users, Adding Over 24M Users Since Vine’s Launch

Toronto-based social video network Keek has seen some tremendous growth recently, adding on 24 million users in just four months to bring its network to a total reach of 45 million registered members. The platform’s growth is perhaps most interesting in that nearly half of it has taken place since the launch of Twitter’s Vine video-focused mobile social networking app.

Vine, if you recall, just recently announced that it has managed to rack up 13 million users on iOS, the only platform where it had been available since late January, prior to its launch on Android this week. That means that Keek has added almost double the number of users that Vine has managed in the past few months, a fact which has not escaped the notice of Keek founder and CEO Isaac Raichyk.

“Our growth has accelerated during the same period that Vine’s been active,” he said. “We believe the next couple of years is when social video will rule, and we’re definitely leading the space.” If anything, it seems like Vine’s launch has raised the profile of social video in general, which might be contributing to the rapid growth of Keek’s user base, though there are other factors also at work according to Raichyk.

It’s worth noting that Vine so far is on only two platforms, with one just launched, while Keek is on Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and the desktop, with a Windows Phone client likely in the works as well. Still, Keek’s recent growth is impressive, and to Raichyk at least, it looks like the user community is generally more willing to adopt mobile social video tools than it has been in the past.

“It seems that there was a tipping point,” he said, explaining the driving factors behind the recent uptick. “We’re very focused on making it easy to communicate via social video, we built a whole brand to encourage social interaction. It seems that in different geographic areas, concentration just keeps growing, and at some point you just have enough content, the community is large enough for things to tip and take off.”

One of the contributing factors behind Keek’s growth that Raichyk had mentioned in the past when discussing his company’s recent $18 million funding round has been celebrity support, but it’s still only accounting for a fraction of the service’s engagement. Around 20 percent of the total Keeks viewed come from celebrities, and the rest of the growth is still bottom-up, the way it has been since the service’s launch.

Last time I wrote about Keek I suggested that video sharing on mobile had yet to achieve an “Instagram” moment. Now, helped along by Vine, and with this tremendous recent growth in interest in Keek, it seems like that moment may have arrived. Besides the 45 million users, Keek has also seen over 667 million visits, offered up 12 billion page views, with 18 million total videos posted and 2.2 billion playbacks of said videos. With both userbase and engagement on the rise, this might be social video’s time to shine.