The Greatest App of All Time Day 19: Vine vs. YouTube

Welcome back to Gizmodo’s March Madness bracket challenge to name the greatest app of all time! Google Maps enjoyed a decisive victory against iMessage in yesterday’s tournament. Today, we have the two best video apps duking it out.

If you’re just tuning in, you can read all about our selection criteria for this historic contest right here. Check out the full bracket of contestants embedded below. And as always, if you think we missed your personal favorite app of all time, yell at us in the comments. Now, let’s get into today’s contestants.

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Here’s what we said about Vine in the first round:

In 2013, Twitter was still called Twitter and Vine was its entrée into the video business. Unlike YouTube, Vine limited users to clips that could be no longer than 6 seconds—Twitter for video, if you will. That simple setup unleashed a flood of creativity online and launched the careers of many influencers who are still with us today. Basically, every time the comedian Conner O’Malley is in the news, I see a fresh round of people sharing the 17-minute compilation of all the vines he made at the platform’s peak.

Like Periscope, Spaces, and well… Twitter, Jack Dorsey and team never really figured out how to make Vine work as a business and the app was shuttered in 2017. The archive of its content was nuked in 2019 and YouTube ended up being a big beneficiary of its creators’ output through the countless compilations that live on over there. But in a way, TikTok picked up where Vine left off and has since become one of the top 5 social platforms in the world.

Elon Musk threatened to bring Vine back in 2022, but as with most of his promises, nothing has become reality.

And here’s what we said about YouTube:

With 2.5 billion monthly active users and a lot of goodwill, YouTube is likely one of the most formidable nominees in our bracket. In 2005, the company arguably invented online video as we know it. The first video that was uploaded to the platform, Me at the Zoo, depicted YouTube’s co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of some elephants while making some basic comments about elephants for 19 seconds. It signaled a new world in which people could broadcast even the most banal clips to billions of people.

And to this day, there is no shortage of useless, unnotable footage to be found on YouTube. But with its revenue share program, YouTube practically defined what it means to be an online influencer and users like Mr. Beast create videos that cost millions of dollars. People use YouTube as their only music streamer (and the platform probably gets away with more piracy than any other). It’s also become a paid broadcast television platform and a babysitter for millions of kids with an iPad. And for better or worse, it has become a place where many people get the majority of their news, resulting in the unfortunate spread of misinformation time and time again.

Most of the criticisms of YouTube’s existence could be said of other social platforms, but few of them feel as essential to the infrastructure of the internet. It is simply the video platform. If you’re watching an embedded video, it is probably hosted on YouTube. TikTok is making a lot of progress, but if you want to quickly lookup a new movie trailer, YouTube is the place to be.

So, reader, what’ll it be? Does Vine still have a stranglehold on your heart? Or does YouTube’s ubiquity earn it a slot in the next round?