YouTube has established itself as the world’s top video site, and it has produced a lot of content creators who build on their fame and eventually become digital celebrities.
Now a mobile app platform called Victorious aims to help these creators manage their businesses by powering individual creator apps. This means that each digital star gets to publish their own mobile apps with Victorious’ technology, which fans can then download from the App Store or Google Play to interact directly with. Creators can simply request an invitation on Victorious’ site.
The apps that content creators can publish with Victorious are meant to help them directly engage with their fans and manage their communities, view related metrics and monetize via several methods available on the platform, including various ad formats and in-app purchases.
Victorious was created by a team of former YouTube executives, including Bing Chen who was previously the global head of creator development and management, and Dean Gilbert who was most recently VP, global head of content and operations at YouTube. Chen explained the rationale of creating Victorious: “Creating a bespoke app is expensive, time consuming and technically challenging. To help, Victorious is a free service that solves highly complex engineering challengers so that creators can easily and quickly create a custom, premium mobile app.”
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Essentially, Victorious wants to be a hub for content creators to manage all the facets of a YouTube star’s business, including their presence on networks other than the video site. To this extent, Victorious supports a number of social networks including Vine and Pinterest.
At launch, Victorious has a few notable partners including beauty blogger Michelle Phan and comedy video celebrity Ryan Higa.
Chen told TNW that Victorious helps to gather up bits and pieces of a creator’s community into one place:
The mass market platforms are invaluable for building massive fan bases, but Victorious-powered mobile apps enable a creator to deepen their relationships with their super communities…
Most digital stars are active with multiple social networks, revenue streams, and creative opportunities. We hope to enable them to more easily centralize and extend those experiences for their super communities.
Victorious isn’t a one-way platform for content creators only though. It strives to engage fans too by letting them create new content experiences and interact with one another, as well as share their favorite content to other platforms.
Headline image via Victorious
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