When Vine first hit the scene in 2012, it was a wild success. The bit-sized video app allowed users to film six-second videos and share them via Twitter and Facebook. They were similar in style to Instagram and Snapchat clips, but had a longer format that allowed for more elaborate edits and post-production SFX. Users could record multiple videos and switch subject matters by pauseing the video to stop recording, then resume to start over again. Vine videos also had music that looped in and out of the video, like a song that repeated in a music video.
One of the most interesting aspects about Vine was its time limit, a constraint that kept the platform from getting corporatised. Its six-second restriction contrasted with Youtube's maximum video length of ten minutes and Snapchat's trademark ten-second photo feature. And it also lent a sense of urgency to the community, requiring creators to constantly update their feeds with new clips (unless they were taking a break from creating).
For many Vine users, the number of revines and likes they received on their videos was the ultimate marker of a successful clip. But for others, it was the amount of times a video was "rewound" or played back that really mattered. Today, Twitter's Vine video network is introducing a new metric that should give users and marketers a better idea of how popular their video content is: loop counts. Loop counts will be displayed on Vines uploaded to the website and through the updated iOS and Android apps, which are being released today. The count will be displayed as a counter that updates in real-time, and Vine says it will not affect how Vines are ranked on the site or in its popular now section.
