I've been fascinated by Vine over the last month. It's growing at a phenomenal rate, but what is it that's really making Vine sky-rocket at the moment?
I'm sure everyone reading this understands what Vine is. If you don't, it's an app that allows people to create 6-second clips of video. And it's awesome.
Fundamentally it's thousands upon thousands of people just trying to get a laugh, which is brilliant, is it not? It's an entertainment machine, like TV or Radio.
Here's Nicolas Megalis 5 months ago celebrating he 200th follower;
And here he is celebrating his millionth follower last week;
From what I can tell about Nicolas Megalis, he's an incredibly talented singer/songwriter and artist doing his thing in New York, making music, videos etc. Please correct me if you know something different but he seems like the kind of artist that is/was struggling to find his audience. I am guessing that his vines are the most popular things he's done to date. It's fascinating to see someone that's got so many ideas find an audience with a format that didn't exist 6 months ago.
A couple of weeks ago there was a lot of concern among popular viners that Instagram's new video feature would see the millions of people there flock over to Instagram. But it turns out that it didn't make a huge amount of difference. People making really good vines are still acquiring followers and the platform is still growing. People who love Vine now seem even more protective and devoted to the app than they did before Instagram video.
The nascent culture of Vine has kept it sufficiently distinguished from Instagram. Instagram users are much more likely to give you 15 seconds of flowers nodding in a breeze than an obese man with eyes drawn on his tummy, feeding grapes to his belly button.
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Brandon Calvillo is another very funny Viner, from California. His humour is acerbic and awkward. His mum often plays a supporting role in his vines by viciously cutting him down when he dares to get excited about his burgeoning followership, which is growing by about 10-20k per week.
I'm not sure that even Twitter or the team developing Vine have fully grokked the culture of Vine itself. The Explore screen, which lists 'Comedy', 'Art & Experimental', 'Cats', 'Dogs' etc seems somewhat at odds with the real popular content. Like it's the kind of content the Vine staff want to be there but really it's all just comedy. If they were to be really honest about it they would name them 'Self-referencial racial stereotyping' or 'Awkward jams'. In my view it would be far more productive to showcase individual Viners - finding a good vine is good but finding a good viner is brilliant.
Vine feels like the kind of thing that Comedy Central might like to have invented. Imagine a brief from Comedy Central - 'an app for people to consume comedy'. Is it likely that they would have ever come up with something as excellent as Vine? I suspect not. Vine is an example of serendipity in product strategy.
The explosion of Vine has 3 interesting things to me. Firstly it has more in common with TV than it has with Twitter or Instagram. If you've been there for a month or so I would hazard a guess that you and I follow about 80-90% of the same people. There are only really about 50-100 people who you would no doubt find worth following - Rudy Mancuso, QPark, Andy Milonakis etc. I'm not likely to use Vine to engage with people I know, I'm more likely to turn to it like I once turned to TV. If you could sum up the use case as a statement it would be "Make me laugh" not "Tell me what my friends are up to".
Secondly, in any human system, a culture evolves and it's the culture that really sticks. Vine is funny, there's really no other reason why you would engage with Vine other than for a laugh. There are some amazing and beautiful stop-motion vines but there's nothing remotely practical or educational on there. And brands like Puma and French Connection have a presence on there - they are using stop-motion to show off product in creative ways but their followers are around the 1-5k mark. It's a classic example of brands misunderstanding the culture of a platform. It seems that the only reason people get attention on Vine is if they are funny. I would suspect that a brand that is funny might get some traction but beyond that it seems like a tough crowd.
When you visit YouTube, you have access to thousands of different cultures. But with Vine, increasingly, it seems you have access to one very large and varied culture - a culture that is itself cross-cultural. Popular viners appear in each others' Vines. That itself is an indicator that a group of individuals who entertain are becoming a network of entertainers, like rock stars in the late 60s, everyone is friends back stage, behind the curtain. It's an asymmetrical follow model where the head is busy feeding the tail and the tail is loving it.
Thirdly, the power of Vine is about the constraints that have been applied by the medium - you only have 6 seconds, you have to have your finger on the screen to be able to record, there's no way to go back and change an individual scene so you have to get it right first time. It's like a visual haiku and anyone that wants to create good vines really must suffer for their art.
