How The Team At Vine Decided That Vine Videos Should Be 6 Seconds Long

When Twitter launched back in 2006, the question on everyone’s minds was why were tweets limited to 140 characters? I’ve always liked the 140 character limit, and it’s helped me become more succinct and clear in my overall communication. Then we learned that the 140 character limit was because an SMS has a 160 character limit, so 140 left room for the colon in front of the tweet. Moving onto Vine videos… why do they have a 6 second limit? Again, there is a reason behind it.

According to this post on the Twitter blog from back in January, part of the reason is to inspire creativity. It reads, “Like tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity.” As it turns out, it does inspire creativity. Just two days ago, Business Insider published an article about a guy who wants to make an entire movie out of 6 second vine videos.

Considering the fact that Vine has 40 million users, there must be more to the genius of the 6 second limit than that. According to this article published on NPR a few days ago, the Vine team experimented with all kinds of different length videos to find the sweet spot. They tried 10 seconds, 9 seconds and even 5 seconds.

According to Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, 5 seconds was too short. They ultimately decided that 6 seconds allowed for the aesthetic feel the creators wanted but preserved the quickness they wanted to promise users. After that, they added the loop to add a sense of excitement to the videos (otherwise they just seemed to start and stop too quickly).

So now you know why Vine videos are only 6 seconds long. You can make your Vine videos 20 seconds with this simple hack, but I wouldn’t recommend it since it goes against the spirit and creativity on which Vine was founded. Instead, see what you can create in only 6 seconds!