Should you keep in mind a time when Instagram was a handful of retro filters and Pinterest was the following large social community, it’s possible you’ll keep in mind Vine – the short-form video app that arrived ten years ago today (opens in new tab).
Vine was the unique TikTok, launching three years earlier than the app that now has over a billion month-to-month customers. Vine was even acquired by Twitter earlier than it launched on today in 2013 as a “new method to share video” on the social community. So what went fallacious? And why may Twitter, a minimum of based on Elon Musk, be contemplating bringing again the six-second video community?
Vine arrived in a extra harmless time for social media when ‘monetization’ was an afterthought and the Samsung Galaxy S3 dominated the smartphone roost with its (gasp) 720p display screen. Social video was a brand new factor and Vine was nicely forward of its time. It laid the groundwork for TikTok and Instagram Reels however fizzled out simply three years later in 2016 – a fittingly brief life for a community constructed on six-second looping movies.
The likes of TikTok have taken its baton, however those that keep in mind Vine will keep in mind the best way it captured the bizarre, meme-heavy humor of the early 2010s web – and even hinted at new types of video artwork, earlier than the sponsorships and inevitable competitors got here crashing in to ship Vine into the historical past books.
A fruitful combo
Vine’s large attraction was that it allow you to simply shoot and share looping six-second movies. This easy thought, which gave its movies a gif-like really feel, sounds ludicrously fundamental now, nevertheless it was distinctive in 2013 – and made it the best match for Twitter, which purchased it in 2012.
Vine’s glorious interface additionally added to its attraction. To report a Vine, you’d simply maintain your finger someplace on the display screen – and you can additionally cease and begin to chop your clip into a brief highlights video, with a progress bar exhibiting you ways a lot time you had left.
The restrictions of the format – initially a most of six seconds, with automated looping – helped Vine take off with creators and differentiated it from Instagram, whose 15-second-long clips did not loop.
Initially, it was a playground for creativity, with infinitely looping gifs (opens in new tab) and cinemagraphs – or nonetheless images with minor repeated actions – changing into a well-liked new format that inevitably then grew to become a staple of promoting campaigns within the mid-2010s.
However as Vine grew to a peak of 200 million customers by 2015, it additionally popularized among the short-form video makes use of which can be extra acquainted at the moment. Brief-form comedy skits, staged avenue stunts, and quotable memes all made Vine the unique TikTok – and helped it beginning a few of at the moment’s greatest social media stars like Logan Paul and Shawn Mendes. Sadly, Vine additionally did not actually have a plan to assist preserve these stars from leaping to rival networks…
What went fallacious?
Vine’s fittingly fast demise in simply three years was down to an enormous spike in competitors from rivals – together with Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and finally TikTok – together with its lack of ability to supply creators a monetary incentive to remain on the platform. The founders made successors like Huddle and Byte, however they struggled to face out in an more and more flooded area.
Vine co-founder Rus Yusupov (who additionally based HQ Trivia, a cell recreation that spiked in 2017) said on Twitter (opens in new tab) that the app “did not assist creators monetize” and likewise “did not see the lip-sync video pattern as an actual use case to construct on”. By shopping for Musical.ly (an app for lip-syncing movies) and finally turning it into TikTok, the latter gave itself some musical rocket gas that made it the fastest-growing app in historical past.
Whereas it looks like TikTok has now sailed off into the gap, Twitter could possibly be seeking to deliver Vine again – though this may be one other considered one of Elon Musk’s harebrained, and finally fruitless, schemes. In October 2022, Musk posted a poll (opens in new tab) asking if Twitter ought to deliver again Vine, with customers voting 69.6% in favor.
However ten years on, the world of social media could be very completely different. With the likes of YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and Snapchat already buzzing with short-from movies, how may Vine probably stand out sufficient to be related? Notably as Vine’s ‘I odor like beef’ woman (considered one of its most enduring memes) is now a TikTok star (opens in new tab)?
It appears extra possible that Vine will stay a second in time, a snapshot of an harmless web era that is now grown up and moved to TikTok for its hits of short-form video. However its dog-dancing memes will reside on.
