Dubsmash

» see dubsmash.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

dubsmash's peak years line up with my early thirties, but the lip-sync video reflex belonged to a younger phone habit than the one i had. i was writing computer vision code in ankara when german teenagers, then american ones, were filming themselves mouthing along to movie quotes and song hooks. i knew the name from tech coverage. i never opened the app.

this is mostly reconstructed from the outside. dubsmash launched on november 19 2014 out of berlin, built by jonas drüppel and two co-founders. it reached number one in germany within a week, then repeated the climb in more than two dozen other countries. by june 2015 it had passed fifty million downloads. rihanna posted a dubsmash. selena gomez made one on late-night tv. for a stretch in 2015 it was the short-video app everyone under twenty-five seemed to have on the home screen.

the shape of the product was simple. you picked a sound clip and filmed a short video over it. that was the whole loop, and it predated the same loop becoming the center of the internet under a different app's name. the app that did this to a global audience turned out to be chinese, not german, and it arrived after dubsmash had already peaked. dubsmash was early and could not hold the lead.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

dubsmash was a german product with an american afterlife. the berlin team shipped it, but the growth that mattered came from the us teen market and, later, from a large black american user base that made the app a cultural engine of its own around 2018 and 2019. that second wave is the part most american writers remember, the app as a place where dances and audio memes started before migrating out to bigger platforms.

~ the fall ~

the problem was never the idea. it was the timing against a better-funded competitor. by december 2019 dubsmash was pulling around 408,000 downloads a month against tiktok's 4.5 million. a year later dubsmash was down near 63,000 a month while tiktok kept climbing. the audience had not left short video. it had left dubsmash for the app with the recommendation feed that kept people watching.

~ what it became ~

reddit bought dubsmash in december 2020. the plan was never to run it as a standalone app, it was to lift the video creation tools into reddit itself. the dubsmash app kept running for a little over a year while reddit moved the pieces it wanted. on february 22 2022 reddit shut the standalone app down and pointed the domain at itself. the lip-sync format outlived the app by years. it just carried a different logo by the time most people were using it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »