A Quick History on the Whirlwind That Was Vine

In todays social media climate, apps are constantly being created and new content is always being pushed. Currently, video content apps are shaping the social scene and creating new influencers almost daily. But one app had to start the craze…

Back in 2012, Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll founded a company called Vine. It was a six-second video sharing app. The videos looped over and over and were shareable to many other social media platforms, creating a unique category for content creation that had not been seen before. It did not take long for social media powerhouses to take notice of the app and the potential it possesed. Twitter bought the app in 2012 for the price of $30 billion and Vine was launched. It quickly became the most downloaded app in 2013 and the numbers kept climbing. Vine amassed over 200 million users in a short period of time due to unique content that it produced.

Vine allowed for users to create funny, silly, unique and informal videos. While platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram were somewhat professional, Vine allowed its users to be in a word ‘weird’. In six seconds, the unexpected would unfold and usually make the consumer laugh. Viral sensations were born from these looping clips, and even years after the app shut down, people still quote their favorite vines as pop culture references.

But the sensation that was Vine was short lived. As much as user’s loved the app, once the idea of video creating and sharing was out there, other apps quickly developed and made Vine less and less unique. While it started as a good blueprint, six seconds slowly became too short of a time frame. Users now had apps like Snapchat with a 10 second time limit and Vine had become out of date.

In 2016, Twitter announced that Vine would be shutting down. Social media was shocked but with the app no longer being profitable, the coorperation had no choice. With this being said, corporations learned from the mistakes that Vine made and took the good from the blueprint of the app. In pop culture today you have apps like Tik Tok, which many people say is ‘today’s vine’. Although Vine can never truly be recreated it did help to shape the way content is created and consumed for the better.