There’s good reason for Vine to celebrate its first birthday. It’s had an incredible amount of growth and hype during its first 12 months of existence. Of course, getting purchased by Twitter while still a start-up doesn’t hurt, plus the six-second video social media site has become a favorite among artists, brands, and savvy social media users.
Just how popular was Vine? During its first day, it captured the top spot in social category in the App Store. Hollywood also caught on and had great success when it teamed up with the Tribeca Film Festival. During the summer, photographers discovered that they could actually make a living from the platform. And, more and more brands began to embrace the format as creative medium to uniquely reach a new audience.
That’s not to say that Vine hasn’t experienced some bumps in the road. There was a problem with adult-oriented videos which resulted in the App Store kicking out Vine as punishment. And, when Facebook debuted Instagram Video on June 20, many people speculated that the days were numbered for Vine.
As Vine enters Year Two, there are still obstacles to clear. For example, Instagram is dominating when it comes to users, roughly 150 million to perhaps 40 million. Also, 37 percent more Instragram videos are shared on Twitter than through Vine. And, with Snapchat getting involved with video, competition is getting stronger.
However, there’s still optimism for the future. Co-founder Colin Kroll stated to TechCrunch that this Vine will be “focused on making it easier to discover those videos and find new accounts,” which could help Vine remain one of the most popular social media sites.
Regardless, it’s one one interesting year Vine, and we all will be keeping a watchful eye on the app. For now, however, let’s celebrate its first anniversary with 25 things that you should know about Vine.
- Vine was developed by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll in June 2012. Twitter acquired the video-sharing start-up in October 2012 and debuted the service on January 24, 2013 as a free iOS app.
- Ever wonder why the official site is Vine.co? That’s because the domain Vine.com belongs to Amazon. It’s been reported that Amazon asked for a $500,000 price tag when Dom Hofmann inquired about purchasing the domain name. However, when Vine launched, Vine.com experienced an enormous spike in traffic, and sales, thanks to the confusion.
- Co-founder Jack Dorsey is a big fan of the front-facings feature on the iPhone and he hopes to run for mayor of New York City someday.
- Not only was Vine denied a domain name, it also missed out on a Twitter handle, which is @vineapp since @vine was also already taken. The Vine owners also run a site VineApp.com which does nothing but redirect visitors to the official site of Vine app – Vine.co.
- The name Vine was chosen because it’s short for Vignette. This is defined as “a short impressionistic scene”. Vignette is also the name of a photo filter offered by the signature Twitter app.
- Did you know that Vine’s logo is a connected V and I in the same way that a vine would wrap around a tree? If you turned the logo upside, you may notice that a 6 appears, which is the number of seconds a video can be.
- It took only three months for Vince to gain one million viewers in April 2013. By August 2013, Vine announced that it had crossed over the 40 million user mark – which was a remarkable 13 million user increase from June. The issue with this number is how many accounts that are dormant.
- In April 2013, Vine was the most downloaded app from the Apple App Store in the United States. It remains one of the most popular free apps in the iTunes App Store.
- The Android app for Vine was released on June 2, 2013. In the same month, Time included Vine as one of its “50 Best Android Apps for 2013”.
- Every second, five Vines are tweeted.
- On April 15, 2013, the day of the Boston Marathon bombing, a record-breaking 19,667 Vines were created.
- When is the best time to share on Vine? Weekends.
- The hour of the day when Vines are sent the most is between 10am – 11am.
- Three of the five most retweeted Vines ever made were created by musicians.
- A branded Vine is 4x more likely to be seen than a branded video.
- Looking for more engagement on Vine? Use Hashtags. For example, when Honda unveiled its #WantNewCar Vine campaign, it gained 1,020 new followers (compared to its six-month average of 242 new followers) and 2,292 mentions on the first day.
- Dunkin’ Donuts became the first company to utilize Vine as an entire television advertisement on September 9, 2013.
- One of Vine’s most well-known users, Nicholas Megalis a 24-year-old musician from Brooklyn , began creating Vine clips for Virgin Mobile and Trident Gum. At the time Megalis had the second-highest amount of followers with 2.5 million
- Top five industry leaders on Vine: fashion, sports, automotive, technology, and print.
- As of August 2013, Ian Padgham – one of the most popular non-celebrities on Vine because of his humourous and stop-motion clips – had over 300,000 followers. He became such a fixture on Vine that he left his job as an in-house video producer for Twitter to create Vine videos professionally.
- The five most popular countries using Vine: United States (38.2 percent), Mexico (8.1 percent), United Kingdom (5.7 percent), Turkey (4.6 percent) and Japan (3.2 percent).
- The Vine app, for both iPhone and Android users, is available in 19 different languages: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Thai and Turkish. Vine for Android is also available in two additional languages: Filipino and Polish.
- In 2013, active teen users grew by an astounding 639 percent!
- The most popular Vine hashtags: #loop, #selfie, #remake, #cute and #magic.
- If every Vine user recorded just a single six-second video, there would be over 2,334 hours of footage. This would be longer than looping the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy 250 times.
Are you on Vine? If so, what do you think of the app’s first year? Was it successful? Or, has the Vine craze run its course?
Sources:
- http://www.cnbc.com/id/100807818
- http://eggboss.com/technology/10-facts-probably-didnt-know-vine/
- http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/vine-facts-tips_b48833
- http://digiday.com/brands/15-stats-vine-and-instagram-video/
- http://www.t2social.com/interesting-vine-statistics-infographic/
- http://allthingsd.com/20121009/twitter-buys-vine-a-video-clip-company-that-never-launched/
Featured Image Credit: Esther Vargas/Flickr
