The Rise, Fall And Re-rise Of StoryFire: Can StoryFire Find Success In 2021?

It’s not easy starting the next big social media platform. These days, scrappy up-and-coming social media platforms are often dead on arrival thanks to the monopoly that sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook hold.

When these platforms first launched, there were still gaps in the market to fill. Facebook succeeded by improving on MySpace, Twitter succeeded by offering something different than Facebook, TikTok succeeded by filling a gap left by Vine’s closure, and so on.

For a social media platform to succeed today, it has to offer something different from the competition that people actually want in order to keep on growing. It has to attract and care for dedicated creators, offering them a good reason to keep posting and creating potentially viral content. Ignoring this is a crucial error and tends to create a platform that’s more of a repost-center than anything else. Just look at Byte, an app that’s meant to be a successor to Vine, but is instead littered with reposted TikTok’s and Vines. The platform is severely lacking an original, dedicated community and remains fairly unknown in the market because of it. There’s simply not much reason to download Byte over TikTok.

So, what happens when, rather than focus on one original concept for a social media platform, you instead try to combine Twitter, YouTube and Wattpad into one thing, then sign a bunch of popular creators from YouTube to make exclusive content for the platform? StoryFire happens, and saying it's a bit of a mess is an understatement.

Some of you may know the name McJuggerNuggets. But if not, you’ve probably seen one of his videos without even knowing it. McJuggerNuggets, whose real name is Jesse Ridgway, is a YouTuber who went viral back in 2013 (and many times more) for a series of videos depicting the members of a “psycho family” freaking out in various situations.

He filmed a lot of these videos over the course of his YouTube career and most of them did extremely well, with the most popular holding over 43 million views and 26 of the “psycho” videos holding over 10 million views each. The videos are pretty authentic, and many unknowing viewers to this day think they’re real when they show up in their YouTube recommendations. Like most other viral freak-out videos on YouTube though, these are entirely fake. Still, they're entertaining and well-made examples of their genre, and worth a watch if you haven't seen them before.

Ridgway still adds to the series occasionally, but lately, his focus has been on his social media application StoryFire. The company started in 2017 with Brian Spitz, the second-unit director of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and the director of the documentary Psycho Family about Ridgway's “psycho” series. The pair started the platform after Ridgway became dissatisfied with YouTube and the restrictions they put on content, including multiple instances where they deleted Ridgway’s videos for content violations.

Beyond that, Ridgway wanted to create a more social version of YouTube where the community could interact in a tighter way. StoryFire was the result of these dreams, and there seemed to be decent support for it upon its announcement and development cycle, with Ridgway's fans showing great support for his platform, particularly the storytelling section of it.

StoryFire has a lot going for it conceptually. The platform, meant primarily to be used on your phone, is separated into three distinct newsfeeds: Social, Video and Written. The social section is essentially Twitter, offering a newsfeed that shows image and text-based posts from your follows, as well as their likes and reposts (called “relits”). Video offers you content from verified creators, including a "Featured" and "Trending" section where you'll regularly see familiar faces like Boogie2988 and Keemstar. The most intriguing and original section is “Written,” which contains original short stories and written content by users that are read one line at a time by tapping the screen to progress.

It sounds like a lot, but the app is well-designed and the sections all work seamlessly together. Separating the content into three distinct newsfeeds rather than offering all the content in one is a great design choice and keeps the app organized. It also ensures there’s a lot to browse through, making the app fun to explore for newcomers. The feeling of community is certainly there too. The app has a dedicated user base as of 2021, with new content uploaded consistently and tons of people interacting. You can tell the platform isn’t as popular as YouTube or Twitter based on these numbers alone (for example, McJuggerNuggets is the top video creator on the platform with 225,600 followers), but they are still substantial, showing off that a dedicated user base does exist. However, how stagnant that user base is is another question.

Things seemed to be going well for StoryFire in 2020. Around the middle of the year, they started signing some of the most popular and fast-rising YouTubers to create exclusive content for the platform, including creators like TwoMad, Pyrocynical, Justin Whang, FaZe Banks and KeemStar.

Most controversially, on August 22nd, StoryFire announced that they verified Leafy on the platform amidst him getting kicked off YouTube and Twitch for breaking various content violations. Surprisingly, StoryFire didn’t get too much flack for this and Leafy fans rejoiced, raising him to No. 4 on the video creator leaderboard and getting the platform new users. With top content creators under their belt – something the platform lacked previously – StoryFire was in a good place to grow, especially with the promise of exclusive content. Nobody is going to download StoryFire to see the same content they can on YouTube, but maybe they would for exclusive content, right?

Well, apparently not. Later last month, Ridgway announced via Twitter and StoryFire that the platform failed to receive proper funding and would shut down on February 1st. The relationship between Ridgway and Spitz had deteriorated, as Ridgway accused Spitz of not investing a fair share of money into the project, having a part in the closure.

Ridgway announced how users could back up their content before closure, and the StoryFire community started posting their goodbye messages to the platform as they prepared for it to disappear. Some creators, like Whang, started uploading their exclusive StoryFire content over to YouTube now that their contracts were assumedly over. The world was preparing to move on from StoryFire and leave it as an interesting footnote in the history of social media platforms.

Then last Monday rolled around and something strange happened. Ridgway posted a video to YouTube, StoryFire and Twitter called “StoryFire Has Been Saved” in which he announced that StoryFire suddenly received enough funding for another year (shown below). The video begins with a call between Ridgway and Spitz where Spitz informs his partner that he can secure a deal with an anonymous investor. The rest of the video is basically Ridgway running around celebrating, sharing the news with his family.

Viewers were instantly suspicious and started accusing Ridgway of faking the whole shutdown to get more eyes on the platform and get dedicated users interacting with it more before it left. The criticism was loud, covering Ridgway’s YouTube comments, his StoryFire posts and the platform in general. Remember, we’re dealing with someone who started his YouTube career-making authentic fake freak-out videos. The reaction isn’t surprising, and the evidence is at least feasible. Of course, people also get lucky, and lying about the financial status of your company is a bold and dangerous stunt to pull off. If done sloppily, it could lose the platform a lot of users rather than gain any new ones.

Last Friday, Ridgway uploaded a video denying claims that the whole thing was a publicity stunt and cleared the air on the situation, providing proof that the platform was shutting down (shown below, right). This inevitably won't convince everyone, but the video seems sincere and the proof is there, leaving no real reason to believe the shutdown was faked. Beyond Ridgway’s legitimacy though, the whole thing raises questions about StoryFire’s ability to grow and succeed in 2021 and beyond.

As we mentioned before, the numbers on StoryFire don’t really compare to other social media sites even at their highest points. A successful DramaAlert video on StoryFire, for example, might gain a little over 1,000 views while they gain millions on YouTube. Even McJuggerNuggets, the top creator on the site, only gets about 10,000 views per video with over 200,000 followers. Who knows what that equates to monetarily on the platform, but the numbers don’t prop the platform up as a serious competitor, especially over three years after launch. It’s still growing, yes, but not as fast as its investors likely want it to.

It’s entirely possible the platform simply didn’t make the money required to keep going due to the amount of time and money the developers have spent trying to prop it up as a "YouTube killer." They’ve spent most of their time securing video creators and updating the video section, largely ignoring the other sections, most tragically the Written section that is the most original thing the platform offers. Some of the stories and series on the platform are incredibly popular, boasting hundreds of thousands of reads and dedicated followers.

There are also a lot of dedicated memers on the written section creating some absurdly trollish stories that are fun to read through. It’s unfortunate that this section seems to get the least attention from developers, as it could be the saving grace of the platform. The featured stories and series rarely seem to change, which is unfortunate, as many users seem interested in reading them.

The StoryFire ecosystem is supported by an e-currency called "Blaze." On the platform, Blaze can be used to tip creators, read certain stories and interact in various ways with those who make content. It can also be converted into earnings for creators.

When the shutdown was announced, StoryFire users began unloading their Blaze quickly as to not waste it. Many users just dumped all their Blaze to their favorite creator as a show of gratitude. When the platform was announced as saved though, these users were a bit disappointed. Many started demanding their Blaze back, while others likely had to settle on purchasing more. It's unlikely these users are going to get any free Blaze and an unfortunate circumstance of the platform's sudden revival. Assuming the whole thing was legitimate though, there's likely not much that can be done.

There are more than a few reasons why StoryFire hasn’t taken off in the explosive way some of its most dedicated fans believe it should. Among those reasons are advertisers being afraid of it for the content. The fact that only verified creators can upload videos, leading to a lack of original video creators rising from the platform, and the fact that the developers have put all their eggs into securing already established creators rather than propping up new creators that could bring fans to the platform like TikTok has done so successfully with stars like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae.

These big creators simply don’t have enough incentive to post to StoryFire rather than YouTube, and only the most dedicated viewers are going to sign up for StoryFire to get the content. Thankfully, McJuggerNuggets has stated he'll be opening up the videos section to everyone in 2021, a move that may drastically help the platform grow. If StoryFire wants to keep on burning in the competitive world of social media, it’s going to need to seriously shake things up and make big improvements in 2021. The intentions seem to be there, and the race is on.

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