Twitter’s Video App Vine hits 40m users despite Instagram’s challenge

August 21, 2013 Leave a comment

Vine hits 40m users despite Instagram’s challenge

August 20, 2013 11:02 pmby Tim Bradshaw

Many thought that Instagram’s addition of 15-second videos to its photo-sharing app would kill Vine, Twitter’s fledgling video app. Apparently not. Twitter on Tuesday said that 40m people have signed up to watch and share six-second videos on Vine. That’s up from 13m at the beginning of June, a figure announced as Vine launched on Android, a couple of weeks before Instagram launched its competitor.Vine’s 40m registered users is not directly comparable to Instagram’s 130m active users. Twitter won’t disclose its active user figure for Vine and we don’t know how many Instagrammers are shooting videos. Yet as it remains among the top 10 US iPhone apps, it’s clear that Vine has found a niche; the question is how large and how sustainable it might be.

Vine’s sweet spot seems to be the internet-friendly space between arty stop-motion videos and zany comedy shorts. Anecdotally, Vine seems popular with a younger audience, a demographic that also lives on Instagram. Brands have taken to it pretty fast, too, despite the smallish audience.

Many of these shorts are being watched beyond the Vine app itself – including on Facebook, Instagram’s parent.

“Best Vines” is currently the most talked-about page on Facebook, according to Inside Network’s PageData service, with 10.7m Likes. In second place is “Jesus Daily”, a digest of Bible quotes and Christian messages (insert “bigger than Jesus” gag here), while another Vine page stands at number 4.

In the meantime, Instagram’s video service has not suffered the backlash that some (including, perhaps, its creators) had feared. It offers some features that Vine is yet to match, such as uploading pre-recorded videos (which will appeal to the semi-pros of shortform video) and more in-app editing.

More importantly, Instagram video is being used by people in the same way they have come to use its photos: everyday Facebook-style sharing of life’s little moments, replete with parties, pets and holiday humblebrags.

Witty shorts could be a big market for Vine and its rapid-fire wisecracking fits well with Twitter’s general tone. But if Instagram is convincing people to share their daily lives through video, that’s potentially a much larger opportunity.

Aug 20, 2013

Vine Reaches 40 Million Users in 7 Months

By Shira Ovide

Vine, the Twitter-owned video app, said today it reached a milestone of more than 40 million registered users — up sharply from the 13 million announced in early June.

Vine lets people shoot and assemble videos into looping, six-second bursts that can be posted on Twitter and elsewhere.

Reaching 40 million users is impressive for a seven-month-old app, but a couple of caveats: First, the number of registered users isn’t necessarily a sign of sustained engagement. Anyone can sign up for an app once and never use it again.

Second, Vine has a long way to go to reach engagement levels seen by Facebook‘sFB +1.59%

Instagram, a popular photo-sharing app that moved into Vine’s video territory a couple of months ago. Facebook said in June that about 130 million people use Instagram at least once a month. A spokeswoman Tuesday declined to give a specific figure for video on Instagram.

What’s clear is that the Twitter and Facebook units are duking it out, including courting brands, celebrities and artists to opt for their app.

Meanwhile, a growing number of one-time minnows — Snapchat and WhatsApp Messenger, for example — are starting to grow into big fish and challenge the image duopoly.

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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