Is Tik Tok the New Vine?

   TikTok is an iOS and Android social media video app for creating and sharing short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. The apps demographic is mostly teens with an average age of 16-35. The app was launched in 2017 by ByteDance.

   “Tiktok is basically a fancy version of Vine, you can use other people’s sounds and follow popular trends,” senior Jacob Rains said.

   Many of TikTok’s users compare it to a previous app called vine. Vine was a short-form video hosting service on which users shared six-second-long, looping video clips. The app started to shut down in 2016,  due to the competition increasing on other well-known platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat.

   “Nowadays, my friends and I quote vines more than we quote TikToks, but TikTok created more stereotypes that everyone knows about so they are both special in their own ways,” Rains said.

   Tiktok and Vine are both widely known by today’s youth, and while these are not the only two video sharing platforms, they are by far the most popular. Vine ended up making 45-50 million dollars total through its users. Unlike Vine, TikTok makes money off of the ads it shows to its viewers and made around 2.5 billion dollars in revenue in 2017, and around 7.2 billion in 2018.

   “Everyone I know at least knows what both apps are, they may not use them, but they still are aware of what they are and why they’re so popular,” Rains said.

   Both Tik Tok and Vine had the same idea, but they still have many differences. On TikTok, video makers can use another user’s sound, while on Vine all sound had to be the creator’s own. On Vine, everyone was really on their own while on tik tok there are cliques such as “the VSCO girl” and “eboys/egirls”. Both are considered iconic and are a huge part of the youth’s conversations.

   “Overall, both are iconic apps, and they both influence how teenagers act and present themselves,” Rains said.