OpenAI’s Sora 2 app launched in late September and for a minute it looked like the next must-have social app.
It hit No. 1 on the iOS App Store in just four days, and cracked 1 million downloads in five days, even though it was invite-only and iOS-only at launch. That is an insane start, and even faster than ChatGPT’s early download pace.
But the hype didn’t stick.
By December, downloads were still strong, but the trend line was clearly moving the wrong way. The app pulled just over 3 million downloads in December total across iOS and Android, a big number on paper, but a slowdown compared to the early frenzy.
The Sora thesis: AI video was supposed to ride TikTok’s wave
The logic was clean: short-form vertical video is where attention lives, and AI content is already eating feeds.
We’ve already seen AI-generated video channels rack up huge audiences on YouTube Shorts. Instagram basically turned into a Reels-first machine. TikTok is the cultural center of gravity.
So Sora wasn’t just “AI video generation.” It was positioned like a content engine built to pump clips into every major feed:
Reels, Shorts, TikToks, Snaps, everything.
Every repost would effectively be free marketing for OpenAI, even if the views stayed on rival platforms.
From feeding frenzy to fade
Right after launch, repost accounts like @bestsoravids on Instagram and channels like Epic Rankz on YouTube were pulling monster views off Sora-generated clips.
But most of the biggest posts were clustered in the first 1 to 2 weeks after launch, when novelty was doing the heavy lifting. By early December, the number of #sora and #sora2 videos getting 1M+ views on YouTube was relatively small, and some repost accounts stopped uploading entirely after a few weeks.
That is the signature shape of modern AI hype:
Curiosity spike → drop-off → power users + trolls.
Downloads are slowing, and competition is not
Downloads tell the same story.
After the initial 1M in five days, Sora added around 5M more iOS downloads over the next three months. But monthly momentum fell:
~2.7M iOS downloads through end of October
1.9M iOS downloads in November
1.5M iOS downloads in December
Android launches early November: 1.4M downloads in November, 1.7M in December
Meanwhile, in December:
TikTok got 18M downloads globally
YouTube got 5M downloads, despite being ancient by app standards
Even in the US (Sora’s biggest market), Sora’s daily downloads quickly fell behind TikTok after Android launched.
Disney might have signed up for the worst part of the cycle
OpenAI and Disney announced a partnership in December that would bring Disney AI access into Sora.
On paper, it’s a dream combo:
the most powerful generative video tool
the most valuable IP library in the world
But the article points out the obvious problem: Sora already had users generating edgy or disturbing content (Pixar versions of 9/11, Epstein, George Floyd, etc.) even before Disney’s official integration.
So the concern is that unless safeguards are extremely strong, Disney may have just handed its brand and IP to the exact subset of the internet that always tries to break the toy.
If you paste the next article, I’ll keep rewriting them in this exact format.