Since its launch in January last year, Vine has become a lot more than just another mobile based social media app. It’s huge viral success has seen the birth of hundreds of famous Viners, an exposure of beautiful animations, whilst also acting as an online news outlet, social hub for evolving trends, and most recently of course video messaging.
Vine
A Look into Vine History
Vine was originally founded by three entrepreneur youngsters, Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll in June 2012, who started the concept as a mobile video platform, “We wanted to build a tool to easily cut video shots together. It crashed a lot, but we gave it to friends and they liked it.” Their original idea of allowing users to film a limitless video in which they could share upon an online community soon adapted to a simple six second video which continuously loop, and then be re-vined around the Vine community.
It was said that Twitter co-founder (and Vine Selfie King - see evidence below) Jack Dorsey pretty distraught when learning of Mark Zuckerberg making the call to buy Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger’s brain child, Instagram in April 2012; so he amongst the other Twitter big-wigs decided to fight back. Dorsey and the crew at Twitter bought Vine in October 2012, for a measly $30 million (compared to Zuckerberg’s $1 billion bid for Instagram). It was later announced as, “a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos. Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity.” By April 2012 Vine was the most downloaded free app on the Apple App Store, which later resulted in over 13 million users by June 2013.
Despite it only being just over a year old, Vine has become a social media hub for generating news content, promoting various platforms of the arts to the online community, whilst also showcasing a whole new breed of a social-media discovered celebrity.
Vining the News
In April last year, Doug Lorman, a bunny-rabbit owning, wife-loving New Hampshire resident used Vine to make social-media history by filming the first coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing from local news report. In less than an hour of posting and sharing the Vine through Twitter, Doug’s clip had been retweeted more than, 15,700 times and seen by over 35,000 people.
Described as “Vine's Tahrir Square moment?" by Nicholas Jackon, the digital director of the Pacific Standard , of course referring to referring to the social media reports of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, in Cairo; the six second looping video saw a sudden explosion from the side of the marathon route, followed by a mass of dark smoke, toppling world flags and shocked runners with one in particular collapsing in result. With the repetition of the video reviewing more and more horrific details of the explosion, this incredibly short video posted by somebody simply watching the local news, was able to act a global news outlet all thanks to the lightening speed ability of social media.
Whilst Lorman was one of the first members of the public to use Vine as a platform for almost citizen journalism, despite aiding an existing news report, Vine has acted as a live account for news outlets from its launch. Within just two weeks, American news outlets, The Wall Street Journal and The Cut both used the video app to report various shows from Feb 2013, NYFW. WSJ’s Style reporter Elizabeth Holmes, and The Cut’s Stella Bugbee took to their Vine accounts to follow in the footsteps as all fashion bloggers alike in filming various shows in order to provide a lot more detail to the garments than still images could ever present.
Vine has even aided in generating seamlessly brilliant PR for music legends such as French electro DJ duo Daft Punk, who exclusively released their track list on Vine via Columbia Records, a month before their expected album release in May last year. Whilst existing musicians love to use Vine to showcase new and emerging work, the app has also acted as a platform for debuting up and coming artists. The sickeningly gorgeous, Husband-and-wife, folk-pop duo, Michael and Carissa Rae Alvarado, or as they are know known as, Us, used Vine to do exactly that by debuting their talents through a variety of short clips entitled #6SecondCovers on their Vine channel. Whilst previously failing to gain the attention of any industry bosses through their (then) 300,000 subscribed YouTube channel, Us’ covers (which includes an addictively beautiful mini rendition of Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball) didn’t only generate a huge Vine following, that’s now at 2.8 million FYI, but a mass of American media attention and a signing to Republic Records.
A long with promoting emerging artists Vine has made celebrities of not only uber-talented artists such as stop motion animated artists such as Megan Cignoli and Tee Ken Ng, Vine has helped create a whole new breed of famous faces, the Vine Celebrity. With more and more Viners, pushing the boundaries of public humiliation, group pranks and Dad themed humour, and now even making into mainstream media with the help of Ellen DeGeneres amongst others, I’ve selected a bunch of my favourite Viner’s who have been hitting big in social media.
Four Fave Vine Stars
Name: Jerome Jarre
Age: 23
Vine Following: 5.2M
Vine Fame: Known for his Cheshire cat grin, unashamed approach to public humanity and cute French accent, Jerome has produced Vine classics including his ‘Don’t be afraid of love!’ “How to be awkwaaard!” and his hilarious whisper “I love you”. His Vine success has even landed him a spot helping Ellen DeGeneres out at the 2014 Oscars
Name: Nash Grier
Age: 16
Following: 7M
Vine Fame: Nash has reached Vine domination with the help of his outlandish friends, crystal blue eyes (super attractive to every female under the age of 17), and incredibly cute little sister Skylynn. He’s bagged an advertising endorsement with MTV to promote their Teen Wolf series. Vine classics include, a tribute to Trey Songz Bottom’s Up, Skylynn’s rendition of Lorde’s Royals.
Name: Ian Padgham
Age: 32
Following: 340.7K
Vine Fame: Fun fact – The video producer and stop animation artist actually left a job at Vine’s occupier, Twitter to become a full time Viner! Was it worth it? With job opportunities at Disney, Mercedes Benz, Nokia, and VISA, I think he’d say so. Notable Vine’s include, his stop motion approaches to notable views and landmarks, interesting approach to male grooming, and anything including his home-found props (especially his wood carved artist’s model).
Name: BatDad
Age: 30
Following: 2.2M
Vine Fame: When Blake Wilson, a Father of four, from Georgia, Atlanta decided to whack on a £2.99 superhero mask and don an incredibly creepy Christian Bale, voice, he produced one of the most renowned Vine stars going, BatDad. His attempts in parenting his adorably blonde children, and surprising his extremely tolerant wife, all whilst in costume has resulted in an online phenomena and millions of adoring fans (literally). You’ll know him best for his humorous references to The Dark Knight, dislike of Dora the Explorer (don’t we all?) and teaching his kids not to swallow gum.
So with Vine producing single handedly the most organically weird celebrities going, whilst promoting exciting media content, and reporting news all by itself, it’s quite simple to see that the big boys at Twitter had a point of whipping it up quickly back in 2012. The app’s simplistic approach to creating video content that is too short to become bored of, yet still long enough to tell a story, has taken over social media in less than a year whilst not showing any evidence of slowing down. Is Vine a social media phenomenon for the ages? It’s looking like it.