Coub, a Russian startup, has a good chance to go extremely viral. Its outreach has grown dramatically from eight million unique visitors to 50 million over one year. Anton Gladkoborodov, the startup's CEO and a co-founder, intends to make Coub, "a purely Russian phenomenon," one of the world's most recognized brands. According to Business Insider, the Coub team has already raised $2.5 million from Vaizra Investments, opened a new office in New York and are getting prepared for a global expansion.
"A Coub looks like a GIF, but it's better than a GIF, because Coubs have sound," says Anton Gladkoborodov, "It's very easy to find a video and trim it, easier than making a Tweet." Coub allows users to create short ten-second video clips, playing on an endless loop, with music or sound effects in it. Creating entertaining funny and bizarre micro-music clips has become amazingly popular. Remixing the existing content of YouTube and Vimeo, users can generate an infinite number of "loops" from their favorite movie scenes or music videos.
"The most popular submissions to the [Coub] site are an eclectic mix of psychedelic art, cinematographs, and pop culture remixes from film and television," The Verge reports. The creators of Coub point out that an increasing number of online media sources are using coubs to illustrate their content.
Coub is still mostly viewed on computer screens, although the company is currently working on Android and iOS applications.
Although the Coub project demonstrates some indisputable advantages in comparison with GIF and Vine, Anton Gladkoborodov is not going to enter a competitive battle: "We have a different type of content. Coub culture is all about mixing and mashup, while Vine is more about filming and social stuff," he says, cited by the CBS News, "Combining different pieces of content from different sources leads to unexpected results and it could be extremely viral."
