PhotoMania looks to carve niche as a ‘social-photo editor’

There are two parties going on in the photo-sharing-platform world. The first party is outgoing, social, and the more guests talk and share between themselves (and with their friends outside the party), the better. This type of party often only has one or a few tricks (filters, effects), and prefers to rely on the social nature of their guests to provide entertainment and thrive. These are the photo-social platforms and their king is Instagram.

The second type of party is a bit more quiet. Far fewer guests attend even though there is much better entertainment and tricks (filters, effects) for everyone to enjoy. These are the photo-editor platforms and there is no clear king at the moment.

These two distinct types of photo platforms have mostly stayed separate, photo-social platforms competing amongst themselves and photo-editors with their fellow editor-platforms. PhotoMania though, a third-party Facebook photo-editing application, is attempting to create a new kind of party – one that is both social, and full of tricks.

Launched back in 2011, the Israel-based application has dominated the photo-editing space with over 400 effects and filters, and constantly placed in Facebook’s top five photo-editing apps. It is currently number one.

Central to this success has been word-of-mouth and viral marketing and a reliance on Facebook’s own reach which has helped PhotoMania get to where it is today, rather than focusing on traditional marketing avenues. It has some impressive numbers to back this up.

Since 2011, 35-million people have used the service, and 3.3 million monthly visitors actively produce over two-million photos every day. To put this into perspective, Instagram had around 27-million iOS users and was well on its way to increasing that with the launch of its Android App before Facebook had its say. PhotoMania is a big photo-editing application.

Unlike Instagram though, it wants to survive beyond Facebook and its solution is to incorporate social elements and ultimately expand its service onto an independent platform – albeit while remaining on Facebook’s marketplace.

The social elements come in the form of a new feature: a “real-time photo stream”. This ‘mosaic’ of photos displays user-pictures as they are uploaded, and can be filtered down to just those uploaded by friends or even just the ones an individual uploads on their own account, all happening, of course, in real time.

Users, furthermore, can like and comment on photos or ‘recreate’ the effect of a picture by adopting it onto one of their own uploads at the click of a button.

“The new social experience connected with the photo stream is our first steps towards turning PhotoMania into a fully independent platform for photo editing and sharing,” explained Ofir Yosef, CEO and co-founder of Trionity Web Services [creator of PhotoMania]. “Our new photo stream provides a fun social experience for creative users, while engaging passive users with attractive social activities.”

The social elements are neat, and add another dimension to the photo-editing service. I wouldn’t necessarily call them innovative, even though the ‘recreate’ function is something I think users will enjoy.

What is innovative though, and bold, is taking the service independent of big-brother Facebook.

A web-based platform is the first challenge PhotoMania wants to tackle, Yosef told Ventureburn, which he confirms will come in the next few months, followed by a mobile application which he estimates should be available at the end of Q3 this year.

Yosef believes that PhotoMania’s use of cloud-based image-processing technology and storage for all of its users’ photos means that moving across platforms will be easier (and thus quicker) for the company than competing photo-editing services.

The web solution will always be “totally free”, but the mobile platform will make use of in-app purchases, such as filter and effect bundles as well as offer premium services, including cross-platform capabilities.

PhotoMania is at an interesting time in its lifecycle. Its numbers are impressive, but its hard to discern how much of this is due to being on Facebook, and how much is due to the quality of the application. The coming months will reveal the answer.

I don’t think PhotoMania, now nor as a future independent platform, is competing in the photo-social space. It is still a photo-editing app at its core, and a rather casual one at that given its purposefully limited functionality. A more few numbers show that there is demand for such a service.

Instagram recently reported that it sees 40-million photos posted everyday from 90-million active monthly users. PhotoMania sees two-million daily photos engaged with (edited and posted) every day from 3.3-million active users.

This means, user-for-user, PhotoMania enjoys more engagement. I’m not saying this is because it is a better service – it’s a different kind of service after all – but it definitely shows that the application has a market, and social elements should, for intents and purposes, improve this. Whether it is enough to survive migrating away from Facebook? Again we will have to wait and see.

PhotoMania and Yosef though, is a switched on company and CEO. Understanding the market, especially mobile, and having flexible technology that allows the application to develop and expand with lower barriers than other potential competition added to an already impressive user-base gives the application a fighting chance at survival. If there is one photo-editing service that could leave the Facebook-marketplace and live to tell the tale, then PhotoMania is it.

It’s definitely a story to watch.

Leaving Facebook’s marketplace (albeit not altogether) is a risky move, and I can respect that. It provides PhotoMania another space to generate revenue and expand its user-base. But I’m not convinced that adding social elements is going to be enough to give PhotoMania a long lifespan as an independent platform. After all the photo-editing platform space is a crowded party and PhotoMania is still a photo-editor at its core, despite some new social element-tricks.

I think far more telling, is going to be how it implements its revenue model, and how it handles the mobile space, that is going determine PhotoMania’s future.