The Swift Life, Taylor Swift's celebrity app created in collaboration with Glu (the same company that brought you Kim Kardashian: Hollywood), is swiftly tanking.
Taylor's game-ified social network for super Swifties started out relatively strong. Like most things The Real Taylor touches, her fans swarmed the App store when it first arrived on her birthday, December 13th. But according to Apptopia, by that Friday the 15th it was already only pulling in at #56 on the overall app ranking. By Thursday, December 21st, The Swift Life was flatlining at #793.
This is pretty unheard of for someone with the kind of name recognition and devoted following like Swift. Celebrities with 1/85th of her Twitter following, like Gordon Ramsay, soared above those numbers with his Glu app, garnering over $1 million in revenue by day 53.
Now before the #haters die of Swift schadenfreude, there are multiple reasons why this could be happening — and none of them have to do with bad karma. As hinted above, The Swift Life is a major deviation from Glu's tried and true free-to-play game model. While it includes some game elements, it's more like a devote social network platform for fans to share Swifty content with one another. Since Glu has always found the most success through its game, this means they were already fighting an uphill battle with The Swift Life.
Another aspect of the disparity could be traced to a general over-saturation of social networks as is. When you've already gotta make sure that your importing your Snapchat story into your Instagram story — and that that Instagram story is automatically updating your Facebook story, I mean, we're already winded.
Actually, if there were ever a fandom willing to sustain the extra responsibility of maintaining another social media presence on an app exclusively dedicated to a celebrity, it'd be Swifties. So the fact that they're not really biting goes to show you that the issue isn't with their adoration for the New Taylor.
For another, unlike the Kardashians, who built their empires on knowing exactly how to best sell their social media following and lifestyle brands, Swift has not been promoting the ever living hell out of The Swift Life to her millions upon millions of followers on Twitter and Instagram.
But those substantial issues weren't even the biggest hinderance to The Swift Life taking off. A few days after launch, the trifecta of Trump supporters, racists, and homophobes turned this simple fan service app into a cesspool from which to spew bad political opinions. Because, in 2017, it's not a social media app if a certain subset of users aren't at least lightly advocating for racial genocide????
We don't know what the right Taymoji (The Swift Life's versioin of a Taylor-specific emoji) is to express our ire, but let's go with ZombieSwift from the 'Look What You Made Me Do' video.
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