Vine, the short-video app, changed the face of the Internet but Twitter didn’t appreciate the goldmine they had acquired in 2012 and closed down seven years later. It made superstars out of ordinary people. It made the music industry do a jig. It ushered in an era of short-form video apps. All it had were six-second looping videos but that was enough.

Look at the way short videos unfolded during the pandemic. TikTok took over the US audience, Instagram Reels is playing a strong game in India while Triller is trying to build a base of captive audience globally. For perspective: the UK is estimated to have a population of over 67 million. TikTok star Addison Rae has 84.7m fans on the platform and 40 million on Instagram. She poses, she giggles, she goes through her fitness routines and the world is watching her.

Wyzowl, a leading creator of animated explainer videos, in a 2020 study said that people share videos at twice the rate than any other form of content while 84 per cent of people were convinced to buy a product or service based on the brand’s video. A decade ago, making a

10-minute video for YouTube was considered by most to be bite-sized. Bites kept getting smaller, down to nibbles.

Around the time Vine was being put through its final days, other short video platforms were emerging, like Musical.ly, which was ultimately acquired by ByteDance in 2017 when the former had around 200m users. It was finally merged with a platform Indians loved and still talk about, until the Centre banned it — TikTok, which has been nothing less than a game-changer. Anything under three minutes can easily be considered a short video but everybody wants to follow trends set by TikTok, which once had a 60-second cap but now allows three-minute efforts, and Instagram Reels with its 60-second videos.

With TikTok shown the door in India, Instagram Reels is having quite a run. “The biggest impact by Reels is the way it is democratising creativity across India. We’re seeing a new generation of short-form creators emerge, who are showcasing their talent and getting a global stage to do so. These are people who are emerging as creators because of the discovery provided for Reels through the Reels tab and in Explore. We have a number of examples today of people from Jalna, Hisar, Surat, Ludhiana and so on, who have grown their accounts by double,” Ajit Mohan, vice-president and managing director, Facebook, India, told t2 a few months ago.

There’s always room for options

With all this playing out, whatever happened to YouTube, the original rockstar of web videos? It launched YouTube Shorts last year and that too from India. It is doing wonders for the platform and is now available in several markets, including the US and the UK. What YouTube Shorts is offering content creators is unique: Google’s service is pushing Shorts’ integration with the wider YouTube ecosystem as a key selling point. The 60-second video experience is picking up steam rapidly.

“Since introducing our initial Shorts beta in India, we’ve already started to see creators using our tools creatively, and the number of Indian channels using Shorts creation tools has more than tripled since the beginning of December alone,” Satya Raghavan, director, YouTube content partnerships, India, has told us.

There’s always room for more options, and Triller knows that. The American video-sharing social networking service has been around since 2015 but since last year, it has been making the right noises. Last August, the company owning the American app announced that former TikTok top executive Raj Mishra has been hired to head operations in India. His earlier role was that of country manager, TikTok India, and has been responsible for the app’s growth in India. He was one of the people who spearheaded the transition from Musical.ly to TikTok. Mishra has a good eye for talent.

India is also home to some indigenous video apps, like Trell and Chingari, both of which are going strong, keeping viewers engaged with local content.

Connecting all these apps and platforms with a thread explains one of the biggest issue of our time — fear of missing out. The very foundation of social media is to make people feel like they are a part of something important, a concert, a fashion show, tech launch or a brunch. When you see a

15-second video of your friend dancing at a party to a Justin Bieber tune, you want to be that person. And tech companies are also feeding on the phenomenon, coming up with filters and video editors to keep the game going. More than filters, short video platforms have made the vertical video format a rage, a format that facilitates scrolling up and down, like a feed, not by tapping or swiping side to side. And if you are not making these short videos, you are spending hours watching them, allowing every 15 seconds to take you deeper down the rabbit hole.

Options aplenty

Byte: Byte is an American social networking short-form video hosting service where users can create 16-second looping videos and has been created by a team led by Dom Hofmann and pitched as a successor to Vine, which he co-founded.

TikTok: The platform changed the short video game with its unique algorithm.

Instagram Reels: Facebook is successfully pushing the Reels feature on its apps.

YouTube Shorts: The short video feature from the grand daddy of video platforms started from India and is now available in several markets.

Triller: The American video-sharing social networking service is picking up steam.

MX TakaTak: In July 2020, MX Player launched short video app MX TakaTak.

Josh: Bengaluru-based VerSe Innovation, which owns and operates local language news and video app Dailyhunt, is behind Josh.

Moj: In a relatively short period, ShareChat’s Moj app has made a place for itself.

Trell: It is particularly strong in lifestyle categories such as fashion, beauty, personal care, recipes, food, travel, movie and TV reviews, among others.

Chingari: Since Tiktok’s ban, the homegrown short video platform has gained wide popularity.

Roposo: The brainchild of three IIT Delhi alumni — Mayank Bhangadia, Avinash Saxena and Kaushal Shubhank.

Mitron: Considered India’s TikTok rival.

The new trend of short videos merely reflects what research has been showing — the shortening of average human attention span. With explosion of information and social media engagements, focussing on one issue for longer periods has become a huge challenge. Impulsive multitasking is slowly worsening our attention span, which is a genuine concern, especially for young people, where academic output mandates deeper focus

Dr. J.R. Ram, senior consultant psychiatrist and co-founder of Mental Health Foundation

The TikTok surge

TikTok has been permanently banned by the government of India since January this year (temporary app ban took place in June 2020) and during the Donald Trump era it almost got sold to Microsoft and then to Oracle (the fate of the deal is unknown), yet the video-sharing-focused social networking service owned by Chinese company ByteDance is doing brisk business. Last week, TikTok revealed it has one billion active global users, indicating steady growth.

TikTok has said that it had around 55 million global users by January 2018 and the number grew to more than 271 million by December 2018 and 507 million by December 2019. The company reported nearly 700 million monthly active users last summer.

But the figure is nowhere close to that of Facebook, which said in the second quarter it had 3.51 billion monthly users across its family of apps, up from 3.45 billion in the first quarter. Yet, the figures come after a rocky year, including a possible US ban during the Trump administration.

Movers and Shakers

Manav Chhabra is mr.mnv on Instagram and he dances and acts into the hearts of 1.7m followers. He has a strong Reels game going

Chahat Anand takes audiences along on gastronomic adventures and has over a million subscribers on YouTube. She is constantly rolling out YouTube Shorts

Actor Ruhi Singh puts out fashion and dance-focussed Instagram Reels. She has over two million followers

Anita Hassanandani is a strong candidate on Triller with videos of her journey towards motherhood

Dushyant Kukreja has 4.7m subscribers on YouTube tuning into his video content around culture

Aashika Bhatia is an actress and social media star with 5.4m followers on Instagram. Usually her Reels videos fetch over a million views

Musician, actor and entrepreneur Josh Richards is one of the most successful names on Triller and he also has a huge following on Instagram