Years before the arrival of video streaming services like TikTok, Vine proved that short-form videos could be a thing. The six-second-long video clips on Vine sparked creativity, and Vine stars like King Bach, Lele Pons, and many others became extremely popular.
Despite Vine’s growing popularity and an extensive userbase of over 200 million active users, Twitter shut down Vine’s sharing feed in late 2016.
Two years ago, one of Vine’s co-founder Dom Hofmann announced that he has started working on a successor of Vine. Well, after months of rigorous beta testing, Vine’s successor Byte has now been launched for both iOS and Android.
Similar to other modern social media platforms, Byte consists of a feed, explore page, notifications, and profiles.
It is worth noting that, most micro-entertainment apps like TikTok don’t offer the ability to monetize content directly. As a result creators on these platforms redirect their followers to platforms like YouTube and Instagram. According to Dom Hofmann, Byte will help content creators to earn money by monetizing their videos.
Byte is still in early it’s early stage and important features like remixability, augmented reality filters, and transition effects might be added to the app soon.
When asked by Techcrunch, if Byte would offer ad revenue sharing, tipping, or other options to partner Hoffmann stated that:
“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.”
Surprisingly, many popular Vine stars like Chris Melberger, Joshdarnit, and Lance Stewart are already on Byte.
Presently, the Android version of Byte only allows users to sign up using their Google account. Once you sign-up on the platform you can start scrolling through the endless loop of short vertical videos.
