It has been three years since Vine shut down its servers in January 2017. Ever since then, the creators have said that we can expect a successor, yet we had no idea when that would be launched. But it has now officially launched out of nowhere, available for download on both iOS and Android. The new short-form video app is called Byte.
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The co-creator of Vine, Dom Hoffman, has been quietly working on Byte without much news being shared to the media, and unceremoniously announced the launch on Twitter. This is after it has been available in beta for several months, to a very limited audience.
byte’s out https://t.co/9XcoEHqmpX
— dom hofmann (@dhof) January 25, 2020
According to Hoffman, he has been developing Byte on and off for several years. He quit Vine just after Twitter bought the company, yet had a feeling the writing was on the wall for the growing social media trend site.
Many suspected that the work on the new app was on hold indefinitely as the last time he shared some official news of his progress was back in November 2018. He said it would launch in the first half of 2019 and when that didn’t happen many bemoaned the possibility of it never seeing the light of day.
Initially Hofmann named the successor simply V2, which then rebranded to Byte in May 2018. Byte’s biggest competitor will of course be TikTok (funnily owned by China-based Bytedance), which has seen immense growth and success all around the world, specifically buoyed by China. TikTok has carved out a niche in the short-form video sharing department and is mostly focused on the younger audience compared to the likes of Snapchat and Instagram.
Vine still has many devotees and we can expect the take-up to be quick amongst the people that remember it and used it regularly. Some create on Vine raked in millions of followers and billions of views over the years.
It seems Byte will focus on a revenue-sharing mechanism to help creators get paid for their work when the app does eventually introduce advertising. “We’re looking at all of those, but we’ll be starting with a revenue share + supplementing with our own funds. We’ll have more details about exactly how the pilot program will work soon,” Hofmann says.
