• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 1, 2022

Is Elon Musk planning to compete with TikTok on short-form video? That's what some observers began wondering late Monday night when he tweeted a Twitter poll asking if the platform should "bring back Vine?"

Vine was an ultra short-form video platform Twitter acquired in in 2012, but ultimately shut down in 2016, even though it amassed 200 million active users. It remains in an "archival sate," even as TikTok's short-form video formats ascended among both users and advertisers, and as rival Meta has sunk a fortune into building out its similar "Reels" format.

At Presstime, about 70% of 4.9 million polltakers voted "yes" to Musk's question, indicating there may be user traction, if not a business case for bringing Vine back.

"If you did that and actually competed with TikTok that'd be hilarious," @MrBeast commented, to which @elonmusk replied, "What could we do to make it better than TikTok?"

You can see the user replies (mostly lots of memes) here, but based on Meta's disclosures during las week's third quarter earnings calls, the short-from video advertising code may be more difficult to crack than some might think, even for a massive established social media platform.

As part of its "This Week Next Week" podcast this week, GroupM's Business Intelligence team noted that Meta claimed to have taken a $500 million advertising hit, which it attributed to its transition to Reels as its dominant advertising format.

While Meta management blamed the lack of Reels "monetization" to the economy and waning ad demand, GroupM Global President of Business Intelligence Brian Wieser commented that the shortfall likely had more to do with the price Meta is charing for those ads, than demand for a video advertising format.

That said, Axios reports that Musk already has asked Twitter's engineering team to bring Vine back.

In other words, get ready for a flood of short-form video advertising inventory.