9781422273296

VINE: MORE THAN VIDEO SHARING Three friends — Dom Hofman, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll — working as developers in San Francisco, founded Vine in 2012. The idea was a side project to their day job working at other startups as a way to splice together videos. “We wanted to build a simple tool that would easily splice video clips together. That was it,” Hofman explained. There was a need for this because at the time, videos were hard to share on text message because of file size and cutting video on a mobile device was complicated. Just four months later Twitter recognized that people were using the technology and bought the platform for $30 million. By 2015 more than three million Vines per day were being watched around the world! Mendes used Vine as a place to post quick parts of songs, like riffs and choruses. Vine allowed people to discover trending content, which helped stars like Mendes build a fan base quickly. While Vine was fun for users, it was not profitable as there were no ads on the platform. Twitter disabled the platform in 2017, much to the sadness of creators using the app. When Vine was shut down, it had millions of uploads from all over the world. GOING GLOBAL The success of “Life of the Party” meant that Mendes had proven himself to a major label. Other artists took notice, including pop star Taylor Swift. Swift was promoting her 1989 album and wanted to tap up-and-coming artists to open for her on tour. At the time Mendes was a junior in high school, meaning he couldn’t take time off to go on all the tour dates.

14

Shawn Mendes

Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs