Bitstrips / Bitmoji

About

Bitstrips was a website and app for generating comic strips featuring customizable characters of the creator and their Facebook friends. The characters, known as Bitmoji soon grew popular in their own right as they were purchased by Snapchat and used in other apps.

History

Bitstrips.com^[1] was registered in April 2007 and the site went into beta (shown below) in February 2008.^[2] The site was created by an artist named Ba from Canada after he found himself spending too much time redrawing his comic characters and sought a way to streamline the execution.^[4] Bitstrips launched the the public in March 2008 after being revealed at that year's South By Southwest.^[3] It was shut down in 2016 after the success of Bitstrips led the company to be acquired by Snapchat.

Stop Bullying Comics

At the end of 2008, Bitstrips For Schools^[8] launched, turning the free app into a paid educational tool. On October 3rd, 2011, Bitstrips for Schools partnered with Cartoon Network to launch an anti-bullying campaign in which people could create their own comics to promote awareness of the effects of bullying. As early as October 6th of that year, people began making parody comics with the program known as Stop Bullying Comics, dozens of which were shared across 4chan, Reddit and Tumblr in late 2011.

Facebook App

In October 2012, Bitstrips moved to Facebook, where users could create a character for themselves that would be made available for any of their friends to use while making comics within the app. In early December, the app was seeing approximately 10,000 monthly users but by the end of the month, they began to see more than 110,000 active users (shown below).^[9]

In the first half of 2013, a handful of news sites blogs wrote about the app including ComicVine^[10], The Baltimore Sun^[11], NPR's All Tech Considered^[12] and Venturebeat^[13], who reported more than 50 million comics had been created by more than 10 million users as of July 2013. That October, the company released a mobile app for iOS and Android that quickly reached the top of the app charts^[7] the week of its release. The week of October 24th, Bitstrips were featured on International Business Times^[14], Daily Mail, ^[19] Refinery 29,^[20] Christian Science Monitor,^[21] International Business Times,^[22] Bustle,^[23] ABC News^[15] and Business Insider^[16], among many others, causing the app's servers to go down for a period of time beginning on October 25th.

Bitmoji

in October of 2014, Bitstrips launched Bitmoji, a spinoff service that allows users to create stickers in their likeness and use them in various different apps. By using a variety of questions, Bitmoji creates one's avatar with what Fast Company^[17] called "eery" accuracy. In July of 2016, Bitmoji was acquired by Snapchat, allowing users to use their Bitmoji in their snaps, which helped bring the app widespread popularity. In September of 2016, Wall Street Journal journalist Joanna Stern posted a video explaining Bitmoji that gained over 75,000 views (shown below). In 2017, Apple announced that Bitmoji was the most popular app of the year.^[18]

Traffic

As of October 2013, Bitstrips.com has a a Quantcast^[6] rank of 31,849 in the United States. and an Alexa^[5] score of 5,396 in the Unites States and 32,186 globally. During the week of October 26th, Bitstrips was the top free app for iPhone, iPad and Android.^[7]

Search Interest

External References