Football may be the overlord of television ratings, and baseball may be America’s (way in the) past time, but basketball rules the social media landscape — and it just planted another flag. The National Basketball Association became the first sports league to accumulate a billion loops on Vine.
In fact, the 1,020,171,853 Vine loops for the NBA at press time is more than 230 million more loops than the 788,125,035 Vine loops Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League have accumulated, combined. The news comes merely eight months after the league became the first organization to reach one million Vine subscribers in April. The NBA has gained nearly 500,000 more Vine subscribers since April, with over 1.45 million subscribers at press time.
The NBA celebrated the historic Vine record with a collection of career highlight reels from Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Lebron James, and a few other superstars from its illustrious history. But it is reigning league Most Valuable Player and the latest baller good enough to be compared to Michael Jordan that helped powered the NBA’s Vine victory. Steph Curry and his three-year-old daughter Riley Curry are in two of the three most looped NBA vines, with Steph being part of four, more than any other NBA player. The four Vines involving Curry accumulated over 30.8 million loops since he made the entire Los Angeles Clippers team look like high schoolers on March 8.
Vine was acquired by Twitter in October 2012, launching the app in January 2013. The NBA joined Vine six months later on June 6 2013 with a vine of Chris Bosh practicing three-point shots before Game 1 of the 2013 NBA Finals. Since then, vine seems to have helped the NBA’s Twitter following. Before joining in June, the NBA had 6.73 million Twitter followers in February 2013, up by 770,000 from 5.96 million in September 2012, according to Statista. The number of Twitter followers increased to 8.07 million in September 2013, three months after joining Vine.
With the NBA adding 240 million more fans on social media in the last two seasons, the NBA may hold court over all other sports for the foreseeable future.
