The newest version of WeChat, China’s biggest messaging communication service, brought a bringing a new video capture and sharing feature called Sight. Holding a button to a 6-second video clip and share, sounds familiar?- yes, it’s basically just Vine.

Already impacting the overseas market, Vine’s potential is undeniable. Kids with huge numbers of followers are a great medium to promote a product. Vine, as a simple video-sharing platform, is everything advertisers want.

Sixteen-year-old Lauren Giraldo has 2.8 million followers on her Vine account. Her fans love the six-second videos she posts on Vine, which show what she describes in her profile as “my random life.” The latest clips include her trip to Europe, dancing in a wired cloak, and attending concerts. Whether you like it or not, she has 2.8 million people following these abrupt snippets of her life. The account started as a hobby for her, but she now makes about $2,000 per sponsored vine by simply clicking on the “re-vine” button to share her sponsor’s video.

Vine’s parent company is Twitter. Twitter acquired Vine in October 2012 for $30 million in a move widely viewed as a counter to Facebook’s presence in the mobile messaging market. The easiest comparison to Vine is Facebook’s photo-sharing service, Instagram. Instagam stepped into Vine’s territory in December 2012 by launching similar video functionality with a 15-second length.

In terms of functionality, the biggest difference is that Instagram can share videos that are 15 seconds in length as compared to Vine’s six seconds. Instagram also retains many of its photo-sharing options for this new video-sharing functionality, such as filters, importing videos, image stabilization, save to camera roll, and so on. Vine, meanwhile, could not be simpler, with only a “save to camera roll” option.

Instagram users can share posts to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, email, foursquare, etc., but Vine’s sharing platform is limited to Facebook and Twitter. This could be a reason that brands on Twitter refer to Instagram more than Vine. In a study looking at how often brands posted on Twitter using Instagram or Vine between November 2013 and February 2014, the statistics shows there are 4 times as many brand accounts using Instagram to advertise than Vine.

After Instagram’s short video service debuted last year, the company now offers two forms of content sharing. Vine still offers its signature 6-second videos, which, one could argue, is no longer as big a draw.

However, on June 7, 2013, four days after Android released a new version of Vine on its system. Vine reached the milestone of having more vines shared on Twitter than were Instagram pictures and videos combined. The user base is still growing, and, with its monetization trend, Vine could be Twitter’s best weapon for holding its valuation in the long term.

As simple it is, Vine seems more interested in giving creators a platform to make more interesting and creative moving imagery. In particular, content that is more “idea oriented.” The 6-second length can be viewed as a challenge, but it can also push users to squeeze only the most useful and important information into the video. In comparison, Instagram’s user base is more likely to document the details of their life no matter how seemingly trivial. The most-shared posts typically revolve around coffee, pets, family party, feet, hands, selfies, and other aspects of users’ daily lives.

Despite having fewer features than Instagram’s new service, Vine’s looping and embeddable function makes it easier to embed content to other websites, circumventing the limitations on sharable platforms to some degree.

Six seconds, looping, idea-oriented: these features are what advertisers are looking for. It mimics the powerful technique of sound-bite advertising, which is characterized by repeating a short phrase or sentence that captures the essence of a certain topic.

Vine, to some extent, achieves that effect. Instagram users upload pictures more than videos, and many users don’t watch videos on Instagram because they tend to take up more memory. Vine videos are very small — usually taking up only bytes. Without so many filters, playing in a loop, users might watch the GIF-like video multiple times, something marketers crave.

People often compare Vine to Instagram because they both offer short video sharing platforms. But in essence Vine is more like YouTube, a platform to share creative video content. The comparison is somewhat ridiculous, though, because there’s no way to put Vine’s 40 million active users into the same context as YouTube’s 1 billion active users per month.

Vine is now in its early stages of growth, but based on the speed at which the number of households with computers, tablets, or smartphones that can film videos is growing, Vine could reach YouTube’s scale much faster than YouTube did. With the now-rapid pace of adoption in the digitalization era, Vine was born in a good age.

 

May 2012, Facebook’s IPO turned into a huge Wall Street debacle and plumped to $17.73 that summer. Today, the tech giant’s stock price has remained around $76 since this July, doubling the company’s IPO price of $38.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg belled ringer by his mobile strategy. When the social network went public, almost all its revenue came from desktop-based ads. But with more than 500 million people consuming Facebook portably, Zuckerberg needed to transition his business.

And that transition to mobile business turned out to be smooth and successful. What has been doubled is not only its stock price, also its mobile active users — around one billion people are actively using Facebook mobile app. What’s more, the social network’s mobile ad revenue takes up more than two-thirds of its total ad revenue. Facebook’s share of total mobile advertising market is predicted to pass 12 percent in 2014, quadrupling that in 2012. That makes Facebook the biggest beneficiary of the mobile age.

Google is another big player of mobile advertising. But its mobile ad revenue accounts for only one-third of its total ad revenue and the price tag on Google’s mobile ads are much less than that of its desktop ads, according to The New York Times. From Facebook’s perspective, things look completely different: one year after its IPO, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson claimed that Facebook’s mobile ads cost more than desktop ads.

The new auto-playing video product is helping Facebook’s mobile monetization as well. The company wrote in a blog post that its 15-second Premium Video Ads will start playing without sound in the News Feed, and the sound will start only when users tap the video.

The company started testing premium video ads last December and introduced these ads on Facebook with a select group of advertisers this May. Facebook will sell and measure the ads “in a way that’s similar to how advertisers already buy and measure ads on TV.” This new function targets “advertisers who want to reach a large audience with high-quality sight, sound and motion.”

Facebook-owned Instagram’s performance will also charge the giant’s mobile business ahead. The photo-sharing app, with 150 million active users, only started to play ads last November. Michael Kors and Ben & Jerry’s are Instagram’s early-stage clients. Spending $1 billion on Instagram two years ago, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has every reason to expect the photo-sharing app bringing in real dollars.

This March, Instagram made a 40 million digital ad deal with Omnicom, a major holding company having a great many big-brand clients, including Nissan, AT&T and Pepsi, and looking to establish a strong relationship with the growing mobile platform. Instagram will be displaying video ads some time as well, just as its parent does.

For today’s Facebook, “Every moment is mobile.”

The day after Thanksgiving, otherwise known as “Black Friday,” was anticipated to reach record sales. The economy is improving, gas prices are low, and the savings were enticing; however, in the end, consumer spending disappointingly did not satisfy the hype for retail profits. Although there are multiple ways to analyze consumer habits during the holidays, Cyber Monday came out on top as the big money maker during the weekend shopping frenzy.

The one-day shopping event of the year has morphed into a week of savings. Thanksgiving has become “Gray Thursday,” then there is the penultimate “Black Friday,” followed by “Small Business Saturday,” and “Cyber Monday.” Although the intention is to initiate the spending spree early, the result may be less spending overall because the consumer expects better savings for a later day.

According to the National Retail Federation, spending on Black Friday was approximately 11% less than a year earlier. Consumer spending was $50.9 billion over the Thanksgiving weekend, compared to $57.4 billion in 2013.

The competition for retail stores to get consumers in their doors is increasingly difficult as shopping online is both easier to scope out deals, and can be done in one’s pajamas on the couch. With the lower price of gas, expectations were higher for in-store traffic, but this was not the case. According to IBM Digital Analytics, sales grew 8.5% on Cyber Monday, making it the largest online shopping day of the year. Holiday shopping online rose 17% to a record $2.04 billion – shedding light on consumer habits.

Although sales faltered on Black Friday, the amount consumers plan to spend on gifts has slowly increased the last couple years, showing the “gift-giving” is still alive in the American economy. The American Research group quantified a series of consumer habits for the holidays, including the trend for spending more money on gifts for 2014.

As consumers are shifting from in-store spending habits to online, it is evident that shopping overall is down from previous years. This, in part, could be due to shifting consumer priorities for their dispensable income. In an interview with Macy’s CFO, Karen Hoguet, she stated, “Shoppers are spending more of their disposable dollars on categories we don’t sell, like cars, healthcare, electronics and home improvement.” This seems to show that even though the economy is improving, it doesn’t mean consumers aren’t entirely comfortable with spending their income on nonessential goods.

There are many other trends to size up the economy during the holidays, including the amount of money consumers are willing to spend on Christmas trees. The desire to bring some holiday cheer to one’s home can be used as an economic indicator. For example, spending money on a fake tree tends to be more economical when you can put up the same tree (with the same pre-hung lights) for many years to come. Although the sales of real trees still dominate this market, the trend to buy a fake tree has increased while the sales for real trees is on the decline.

A final last thought to wrap up the economics of the holidays– need help picking out a Christmas gift for a loved one? According to Joel Waldfogel, author of the books, “Scroogenomics,” people value gifts about 20% less than the price tag number. In his own words, Waldfogel believes, “The choice to buy presents turns out to destroy a lot of value.” It does sound a bit scrooge-like, but maybe giving a gift card isn’t impersonal after all – it’s just economical.