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TRANSAERO №12 December 2013
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COUB: LESS IS MORE Creating a brand new video service when you already have giants like YouTube and Instagram successfully occupying this field might be a somewhat insane idea. But it turns out nothing is impossible as long as you use some imagination.
NIKITA GR ANKO
SHAMIL GAR AEV
COUB WAS OFFICIALLY DISCOVERED WHEN THE LATE NIGHT SHOW WITH IVAN URGANT FEATURED A VIDEO CALLED “NIKITA SERGEEVICH LAMAR”. In the video Nikita Mikhalkov, a prominent Russian film director, plays the role of Prince Pozharsky from the movie The State Counseller and performs eye-catching dance moves to the tune of Kendrick Lamar’s Backseat Freestyle. The video had already created a stir on the web before it aired and by the end of the month the number of views had reached one million. Today this number is around three and a half million. Nothing special by YouTube standards, but this is a different case. The video in question (or as it is now known – the coub) was created on coub.com – an online service for making looped videos that run endlessly. All the user has to do is choose an extract from a video (up to 10 seconds long), apply the settings and let the service work its magic. Coub can be used to create all sorts of things. It simply depends on your imagination. Coub was invented by Anton Gladkoborodov, who had previously worked on Look at Me, Theory & Practice and Meatlook among other things. He doesn’t like to call it an invention, however, saying he only noticed something that had already existed. “There’re examples of looped videos in real life. Burger King has screens showing steam rising from its burgers – this
SOURCE VIDEO DANCING BUNNIES IN WINE GLASSES
SOURCE VIDEO CAT MAYHEM
is almost like a сoub. It is not that we came up with a unique idea, this was about us seeing something that no one else had spotted,” – he explains in one of his interviews. Indeed, there are a lot of applications for Coub: moving photos, product presentations, funny videos and more. But it turned out such variety is not always helpful: the creators of Coub thought at length on how to promote it. Having started with moving photos which looked ideal for social networks, they soon realized users had more
fun creating funny videos. Comparing Coub to gifs, only with music, wasn’t such a great idea either and faced opposition from the more prudish geeks. It took the creators some time to realize that any attempts to describe Coub through terms familiar to the public were doomed to failure. Today Anton Gladkoborodov simply says that “Coub is a looped video up to 10 seconds long” and then shows what it can do. The project was launched in April 2012 and Russia was never
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going to be its sole market. In fact, it gained popularity at home to some extent by accident. A customary player upgrade which allowed adding coubs on VK, Russia’s most popular social network, saw a coub appear on one of its public pages, namely MDK (an imageboard type page) – and so it began. “At the time we had a vague idea of MDK and VK’s media capabilities. The funny thing is that coubs had been posted everywhere before that – Slon, Look at Me, Afisha, Lenta, many famous people had shared them, but nothing delivered the goods. And two million teenagers – well, they delivered admirably.” (Extract from Growth Hacks interview). The service has indeed overseen a remarkable growth in popularity. Following its launch Coub was kept alive by its developers – each had to come up with one coub daily – but now, a year and a half later, more than a thousand new videos appear on the website daily and nine million unique visitors per month.
Coub looks increasingly compelling since the turn of the year. The growing popularity of video services has suddenly made Mr. Gladkoborodov’s project part of a trend. Coub does not pose as a rival to other favorites in the field as their different capabilities – Instagram (15 seconds) and Vine (6 seconds) – are enough to allow them to each hold their ground. The Russian startup has more in common with Vine, in fact, but while the latter allows users to act as directors, Coub is primarily about montage. It is not to say, you can’t use your own videos, but it is a lot funnier (and more popular for that matter) to rework already existing clips. There has been no rush to develop Coub, with all the main upgrades to date aimed at fixing the current bugs. But this may change soon. The project, which used to run on its developers’ money, attracted one million dollars of investments this summer. The team doesn’t lack ideas for development:
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new range of features, new markets, commercial offerings. Already it seems Coub has become something far greater than originally planned: the Russian media called it a postmodern popular video art and a new form of visual slang. When you think about it people today prefer series or even YouTube videos to full-length films, particular songs to whole albums and short articles to long novels. In this respect Coub clips look like an extension of this human trend. These clips’ ability to contain their entire meaning in a mere 10 seconds make them more than just a video extract with added sound. The scope for imagination is truly limitless: an ordinary edition of Distorting Mirror turns into a genuine Satan’s ball as described most famously by Bulgakov, while Nazis jumping carefree on chairs around a festive table become a video for a Daft Punk song. And yet this is just the beginning: it might well be that these short, unending videos will soon have their own exhibition.