Vine grows to 40 million users, despite Instagram challenge
Regardless of competition from Instagram's recently released video offering, Twitter's 6-second-video app is adding new users at a rapid clip.
Seven months since its release, Twitter's Vine application for shooting and sharing 6-second looped videos has racked up 40 million registered users, the company announced in a tweet Tuesday.
Launched in late January on iOS, Vine lets smartphone owners record little video snippets, bit by bit, to create miniature movies. By the time of its release on Android in June, Vine had attracted 13 million registered users, but an early July update that introduced channels and "revines," aka shares, raised the profile of emerging Vine stars and allowed videos to go viral.
We've said this before and we'll say it again: this community - now more than 40 million of you - is amazing. Thank you for inspiring us.
— Vine (@vineapp) August 20, 2013
The new user metric demonstrates massive pickup in the past two months and suggests that the application has carved out its own distinct niche in social-media land, and isn't at risk of falling victim to Instagram's video offering, as was initially suggested.