We partnered with AWS to tell the story about how we grew from memories to monetization.
Founded in February 2011 in a marathon Foursquare Hackathon, Timehop is an app, whose primary goal is to help people connect with each other around the past. Timehop takes your digital memories, social media posts, and all your photos, packages them up into a new form of scrapbook, and serves them back to you as a daily trip down memory lane.
The idea behind it and the impeccable user experience quickly made Timehop go big. However, the rise in popularity came with its own set of obstacles. As the number of app users grew, so did the requirement for increased data storage, and processing power. The team also needed to find ways to grow the monetization model and make it more efficient. While Timehop collectively agreed that users shouldn’t be spending their dollars on their own memories, it was decided that integrating in-app ads was preferable to implementing a subscription model. But, it could not come at the expense of the user experience when viewing memories. Third-party solutions saw initial growth in ad revenue, but issues impacting the user experience, like ads taking over the user screens and unexpectedly playing sound, quickly became deal-breakers.
It became clear that the best way to significantly grow revenue without interfering with the in-app experience was to create their own in-house ad auction platform, Nimbus.
