Musical.ly Now Offers Original Content, Thanks To Viacom, NBCU, Hearst

Musical.ly is primarily known as a social media platform for those who like to do lip syncing vids, but the company is now starting to offer original content, made possible through recent partnership deals struck with content providers such as Viacom, NBCU, and Hearst. These three entities will be providing short length video series to the Musical.ly mobile app. 

But unlike those original videos offered by the Snapchat app, Musical.ly’s content will be of the interactive kind. Basically, the video series will urge Musical.ly’s existing customer base (who obviously already do not mind producing and sharing their own vids to family and friends) to post their own personalized reactions to the original shows through the use of hashtags. 

As pointed out by Variety, the new video series on Musical.ly will made available for free viewing, and will not come with any ads or other forms of monetization (or at least for now). The approach will lean more into exploring how people will respond to original content delivered by way of the Musical.ly app. It should be noted that Musical.ly has not paid its content provider partners to produce the video series.

Just this week, the first couple of series of the new original programs have already launched. These shows will be shown at the top of the Musical.ly mobile app’s Trending section for a period of 24 hours. What exactly are these shows all about? Well, the first one is an abridged version of the Nick Cannon’s Wild ‘N Out comedy series on Viacom/MTV. As for the second one, it is none other than Fashion to DIY For produced by Seventeen. There are two new shows coming -- namely MTV’s Greatest Party Story Ever and Seventeen’s Seventeen in the City -- both will make their debuts this coming Saturday.

When it comes to social media platforms, Musical.ly is not as big as the Facebooks and Snapchats of the world. But its brand has proven to be a hit, especially among teenagers and even tweenagers. Last summer, the startup was valued at about half a billion dollars, when raising a $100 million round. Despite being in a very competitive field, its mobile app has accumulated downloads of about 200 million in number. And back in December of last year, the company revealed that it has more than 40 million active users on a monthly basis. An active user base of 40 million each month is not bad, considering that its main audience is basically just kids.