Is Vine Dying?
When Vine peaked in popularity with the general masses in 2013, it was everywhere. You couldn’t go on Facebook without seeing a couple of Funny Vines in your newsfeed. So, where has all the popularity gone? Is Vine dying off just because the initial ‘shock factor’ has worn off? The short answer is no.
A large majority of people don’t realize that Vine was actually founded in 2012 by a few independent developers named Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll. At this point in time, not many people had heard of the social network and it wasn’t until Twitter bought them out for $30 million that more people started to take notice. Ever since then, Vine has become Twitter’s new baby and they are showering it with attention. According to Alexa, Twitter is the 8th biggest website in the world, and has only gained popularity since it’s inception. It does not seem likely that such a huge corporation would let it’s newest acquisition die off, especially when it has found such a strong niche among teenagers. Instagram has even tried to replicate the success of Vine with 15 second long Instagram Videos, but hasn’t seemed to be able to reproduce the same magic of the 7-second video looping community.
Going back to Alexa ranks, Vine definitely does not show signs of decline. As a matter of fact, the website vine.co has never been bigger. It has been climbing the Alexa ranks in the past couple of years and received a huge boost when they launched their very own web viewer. Up until then, websites like VidCrown have been providing users with a way to view Vines online, and still do. As of January 2015, there are 12 million daily uploads and 1.5 billion daily views on Vine. These numbers are undoubtedly high, but what’s more shocking is that the user base grows by roughly 25% every 6 months.
So why do people insist that Vine is losing users? Perhaps it is because that Vine is no longer considered an innovative social network. The novelty has worn off and every day Joe’s have stopped posting Vine videos to Facebook and Twitter. But, that does not mean that the user base is declining. Vine has found a strong niche among young adults and comedians. Many aspiring comedians (or just goofy teenagers) use Vine to try to gain an audience after seeing how it has helped others.
A few success stories include Nash Grier, KingBach, Brittany Furlan, Jerome Jarre and Curtis Lepore. You may have heard of some of these names before and they owe their online celebrity status solely to Vine. There are new potential stars being born every day on Vine, and (if you don’t use the app) you won’t hear about them until they have been chosen by the community to move up and away to better things than 7-second videos.
To summarize this article, Vine is certainly not dying, all you have to do is download the app to see so.
