Latest / Mini Scroll / The Rise & Fall of Vine: How a Broken Relationship with Creators Sealed The Platform’s Fate

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The Rise & Fall of Vine: How a Broken Relationship with Creators Sealed The Platform’s Fate · Mini Scroll

• 0:00
  With summer coming up, we're entering my favorite season of
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  all, Margarita season. I love a classic, refreshing
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  Margarita on a hot summer's day to enjoy up barbecues, picnics,
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  Time to embrace Margarita season with Jose Cuervo and remember to
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  drink responsibly in June 2012. Russ Yusupov.
• 0:29
  Dom Hoff Hoffman and Colin Kroll launched a platform that would
• 0:32
  change the future of the creator economy.
• 0:35
  Russ, Dom and Colin were tech professionals working together
• 0:38
  in New York City at the travel site Jetsetter when they came up
• 0:42
  with an idea to create a video editing tool in app form.
• 0:45
  But after a successful trial with a small group of users, the
• 0:48
  founders decided to add a social component to the platform as
• 0:52
  well. That platform was called Vine.
• 0:55
  Upon its launch, Vine was positioned as a social video
• 0:58
  platform where users could record, edit and upload clips of
• 1:01
  their intimate moments with friends and family for public
• 1:04
  consumption. Where Instagram was for static
• 1:06
  images and YouTube was for long form video, Vine filled a gap in
• 1:10
  the digital entertainment space for short form video that
• 1:13
  prioritized user retention with snappy 6 second videos.
• 1:17
  By 2013, Vine had been acquired by Twitter and became the most
• 1:21
  downloaded free app on iOS. But despite its wild success out
• 1:26
  the gate, Vine would shutter just 4 1/2 years after its
• 1:29
  launch, giving the tech industry one of its biggest lessons to
• 1:33
  date. No amount of users can save a
• 1:36
  platform that is losing its biggest creators and as a
• 1:39
  result, decreasing in cultural relevance.
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  From Centennial World. I'm Lauren Meisner and this is
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  Infinite Scroll, a podcast about Internet culture, the creator
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  economy and how social media is shaping Gen.
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  Z Welcome back to Infinite Scroll, everyone, and thank you
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  format. You keep me informed and I
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  really trust your opinions and reporting.
• 3:01
  Thank you so much. So for today's episode, I'm
• 3:04
  really excited to be bringing you guys the rise and fall of
• 3:07
  Vine. How a broken relationship with
• 3:09
  creators sealed the platform's fate.
• 3:18
  From eyebrows on fleek to look at all those chickens, Vine
• 3:21
  produced some of the most quotable content in Internet
• 3:24
  history. While Vine has had its chokehold
• 3:27
  on millennials and Gen. Z for years, with many of us
• 3:30
  continuing to quote famous clips, its trajectory was unlike
• 3:33
  many other social media platforms.
• 3:35
  After launching in 2012, it closed five years later.
• 3:39
  After a rapid decline in the cultural zeitgeist, Vine was
• 3:42
  founded by three tech entrepreneurs, Russ Yusupov, Dom
• 3:46
  Hoffman, and Colin Kroll, in June 2012.
• 3:48
  While Vine might now feel basic, it was actually groundbreaking
• 3:52
  for its time because it made short form content accessible
• 3:55
  and mainstream. But for those of us who aren't
• 3:57
  exactly familiar with Vine, the platform was known for its six
• 4:01
  second clips that would play on loop.
• 4:02
  Users could easily create, watch, and share these videos
• 4:05
  through their feeds. The decision to make each Vine
• 4:08
  video 6 seconds long was actually a strategic one at the
• 4:12
  time. Long for TikTok dominated
• 4:14
  culture, videos on smartphones were still a new and foreign
• 4:17
  thing. This was back when phone plans
• 4:19
  had strict data limits, so people were worried about using
• 4:22
  it all up. Vine's six second cap struck the
• 4:25
  perfect balance, getting users hooked on bite sized stories
• 4:28
  while easing concerns about data usage.
• 4:31
  The looping feature was also key to Vine's success.
• 4:34
  As Co founder Hoffman explained to The New Yorker in 2013, it
• 4:38
  was integral to the platform's format quote.
• 4:41
  It just has to do with the nature of the medium.
• 4:43
  Since it is so short at six seconds or less, it feels very
• 4:46
  incomplete if it doesn't loop, the founder explained.
• 4:49
  I think when people remember things in the past, they view
• 4:51
  those things on repeat. While Vine would become known
• 4:54
  for its comedic content, this wasn't what the platform was
• 4:57
  intended for, as contributing editor Casey Newton explains for
• 5:01
  The Verge quote. Its founders had envisioned
• 5:03
  their tool for making six second clips as a way to help people
• 5:06
  capture casual moments in their lives and share them with
• 5:09
  friends, according to an article from The New Yorker.
• 5:12
  Hoffman and blog post introducing the platform likened
• 5:15
  posts on Vine to abbreviations, saying to treat the content on
• 5:19
  the platform as quote little windows into the people,
• 5:21
  settings, ideas and objects that make up your life.
• 5:25
  Soon, however, it became clear that Vine would never be exactly
• 5:29
  what the founders intended. Newton for The Verge recalls
• 5:32
  that Hoffman said that the founders could tell early on
• 5:34
  that the apps culture would be 1 of experimentation.
• 5:38
  Quote. It became very clear as soon
• 5:40
  after we launched. Watching the community and the
• 5:42
  tool push on each other was exciting and unreal, and almost
• 5:45
  immediately it became clear that Vine's culture was going to
• 5:48
  shift towards creativity and experimentation, Hoffman tells
• 5:52
  Newton. With that being said, the power
• 5:54
  of Vine was obvious from the early days on the platform, so
• 5:57
  much so that Twitter acquired the platform in 2012.
• 6:01
  Twitter made the decision to purchase the platform for $30
• 6:03
  million in October of that year. At the time, Vine was only a
• 6:07
  three person company and hadn't even launched to the public yet,
• 6:11
  according to the New York Times reporting, Twitter Co founder
• 6:13
  Jack Dorsey pushed for the deal, believing that Vine was quote
• 6:16
  the next big thing in social media, essentially an Instagram
• 6:20
  with video. It was a couple months earlier
• 6:22
  that Facebook acquired Instagram, with Mark Zuckerberg
• 6:24
  making a bid to buy the platform in April 2012.
• 6:27
  With another text based social media platform embracing a
• 6:30
  visual platform like Instagram, it was only natural for a
• 6:33
  competitor like Twitter to follow suit.
• 6:35
  And Dorsey's bet on Vine paid off, but only for a little
• 6:39
  while. Six months after its official
• 6:42
  iOS launch in January 2013, Vine had attracted 13 million regular
• 6:46
  users. Three months later, that number
• 6:49
  tripled, according to Mike Isaac of The New York Times quote.
• 6:52
  Brian Hobart, an analyst at 7 Park Data, estimated that at the
• 6:56
  height of Vine's popularity, roughly 3.64% of Android
• 7:00
  smartphone users in the United States used Vine at least once a
• 7:04
  month. The journalists continued.
• 7:06
  That may not sound like much before a company that had barely
• 7:09
  existed a year earlier. It was enormous.
• 7:12
  Many journalists and pundits would go on to credit Vine's
• 7:15
  success to the introduction of front facing camera videos,
• 7:19
  which let users record themselves, not just their
• 7:21
  surroundings, giving the platform a whole new level of
• 7:24
  engagement. They also tend to agree that
• 7:26
  Vine reached its peak in 2014, which unfortunately also marked
• 7:31
  the beginning of the end for the platform.
• 7:33
  The New Yorker journalist Tad Friend would even position Vine
• 7:36
  as one of the few platforms that was actively challenging YouTube
• 7:39
  during this period. Quote Nowadays, YouTube is
• 7:42
  almost it's alarmingly professional.
• 7:44
  It is millions of channels devoted to personalities and
• 7:47
  products, which are often aggregated into verticals
• 7:50
  containing similar content. But YouTube's primacy as the
• 7:53
  place teenagers go after school is already being challenged,
• 7:56
  especially by Vine, an app of looping 6 second videos that
• 8:00
  launched last year, Friend writes.
• 8:02
  In 2014, Vine became a kind of mobile social MTV with a
• 8:07
  soundtrack of hits to rock out to or mock and with kids as the
• 8:10
  stars. Vine's cultural impact It's
• 8:13
  clear while Twitter never exactly revealed how many people
• 8:16
  used Vine, it claimed the platform once had an audience of
• 8:19
  200 million on the web, as reported by Casey Newton for The
• 8:23
  Verge, a major factor behind Vine's success was the creator
• 8:26
  ecosystem it cultivated. Vine developed its own class of
• 8:29
  creators, many with millions of followers, whose content
• 8:33
  regularly racked up 10s of millions of views.
• 8:36
  Unsurprisingly, these creators became central to the platform's
• 8:40
  appeal. To truly grasp Vine's culture,
• 8:42
  It's creators, and the content that did well on the app, it's
• 8:46
  worth taking a walk down memory lane to revisit some of its top
• 8:49
  influencers. This definitely won't be an
• 8:52
  exhaustive list, but it will capture the essence of what made
• 8:55
  Vine so unique. Now, if you were a teenage girl
• 8:58
  on Vine, chances are you are familiar with Magcon.
• 9:01
  An acronym for Meet and Greet Convention.
• 9:04
  MAGCON started as just that, a convention, but it quickly
• 9:07
  spiraled into something with long lasting cultural appeal.
• 9:11
  The convention started in 2013 as a way for social media users
• 9:14
  to meet their favorite Vine stars.
• 9:16
  Among them were creators Nash Greer, Aaron Carpenter, Cameron
• 9:20
  Dallas, Taylor Kniff, Jack Galinsky, Jack Johnson, Carter
• 9:23
  Reynolds, Matthew Espinosa, and Shawn Mendes.
• 9:27
  Yes, that Shawn Mendes. Soon this group of boys
• 9:31
  alongside Mahogany locks would become known as a creator
• 9:34
  collective, Magcon. While Magcon has evolved over
• 9:38
  the years with new members, the original lineup remains the most
• 9:41
  iconic. The convention was founded by
• 9:43
  Bart Bordelin. According to various reports,
• 9:46
  Bart came up with the idea after Vine star Aaron Carpenter held a
• 9:49
  meet and greet that drew over 200 people.
• 9:52
  Magcon followed a similar path, with fans of popular Vine stars
• 9:55
  gathering at shopping centers and hotels Hells across the
• 9:58
  United States. Eventually, mag con even made
• 10:01
  its way to Australia and Europe. The group became so popular that
• 10:04
  Netflix released Chasing Cameron in 2016, a documentary that
• 10:08
  focused on Cameron Dallas and his experiences with viral fame
• 10:12
  as one of the most prolific mag con boys.
• 10:14
  A mag con show was reminiscent of the content these Viners
• 10:17
  shared on the platform, though much of the six second videos,
• 10:20
  it didn't always translate that well to the stage.
• 10:23
  Still, attendees watched the boys lip sync and dance to pop
• 10:26
  songs with plenty of thirst traps.
• 10:29
  Some of the boys even ended up shirtless, which was kind of
• 10:32
  insane because they were all basically between the ages of 16
• 10:36
  and 20. That being said, the Magcon boys
• 10:38
  initially went viral for their comedic content.
• 10:40
  But as their show suggests, they were also known for their thirst
• 10:44
  traps, many of which involved lip syncing or dancing to the
• 10:47
  infamous Grind on Me song. We can't talk about Magcon
• 10:50
  without acknowledging that some of the boys and their content
• 10:53
  promoted problematic rhetoric about women.
• 10:56
  To be fair, many of them for teenagers, but spreading
• 10:59
  negative messaging about women on such a massive platform was
• 11:02
  upsetting and harmful for many of their followers. 1 notable
• 11:06
  example is the video What Guys Look for in Girls featuring
• 11:09
  Nash, Cameron and YouTube JC Kalin.
• 11:12
  The video. Unsurprisingly it was
• 11:14
  controversial, with the boys essentially listing off quote UN
• 11:17
  quote requirements for women. Nash received the most backlash
• 11:20
  for comments like insisting girls shave their armpits and
• 11:24
  any Peach fuzz while ironically pushing for the natural look.
• 11:28
  In the video, he would even call women whores if they made things
• 11:32
  too easy for men. The video has since been
• 11:34
  deleted. Another troubling instance
• 11:37
  involved Jack Galinsky, who gained popularity on Vine
• 11:40
  alongside his childhood friend Jack Johnson.
• 11:42
  Jack Galinsky would go on to date Madison Beer for about two
• 11:45
  to three years, breaking up in 2017.
• 11:48
  Their relationship was widely shipped by social media users,
• 11:52
  but it also drew criticism due to their age gap.
• 11:55
  Madison was 15 and Jack was 18 when they first started dating.
• 11:59
  After their breakup, an audio clip capturing Jack Galinsky
• 12:02
  verbally abusing Madison was leaked to the public.
• 12:06
  In a since deleted Twitter post, Jack confirmed that the audio
• 12:09
  was real and had been recorded a year before it was leaked.
• 12:12
  He apologized, stating he was in a quote, very dark place at the
• 12:16
  time. Ultimately, it's clear that many
• 12:19
  of the Madcon group gained their popularity largely due to their
• 12:22
  privilege and appearance. While content standards were
• 12:25
  different back then, it's fair to say that much of what they we
• 12:27
  were producing wasn't exactly high quality content.
• 12:31
  That being said, many of the Mag Con boys struggle to turn their
• 12:34
  Vine fame into long lasting careers.
• 12:36
  Jack Galinsky and Jack Johnson, for instance, formed the music
• 12:40
  duo Jack and Jack, while Cameron Dallas made a brief move to
• 12:43
  Broadway, starring as Aaron Samuels in Mean Girls alongside
• 12:47
  Renee Rapp. Despite these efforts,
• 12:49
  sustaining success off the platform proved challenging for
• 12:52
  many of the Mag Con boys. While Mag Con dominated a
• 12:54
  significant corner of Vine, other popular creators made
• 12:58
  their mark to take King Batch, for example, for a long time, he
• 13:02
  was the apps most followed person, surpassing Nash Grier in
• 13:05
  March 2015 when he hit 11.3 million followers.
• 13:10
  He also lived in 1600 Vine for a time, the apartment complex that
• 13:14
  sat at the heart of the Vine world.
• 13:16
  Essentially, many of the platform's top creators lived in
• 13:19
  the complex and made content sort of like a content house
• 13:22
  before a content house quote. The apartment complex became the
• 13:25
  Nexus of the Vine world by By 2015, nearly 20 of the apps
• 13:29
  biggest creators lived in the complex.
• 13:32
  Taylor Lorenz reports for The Washington Post.
• 13:34
  Unlike many mag con members whose content focused on pranks
• 13:37
  or jump scares batches Vines were mostly scripted skits that
• 13:41
  he wrote, directed, and edited. He would even go on to make
• 13:44
  Vines with Justin Bieber. While it may have been a product
• 13:46
  of its time, much of his humor was edgy and at times,
• 13:50
  problematic. He ultimately ended up facing
• 13:52
  intense backlash by Twitter users in 2020, with many finding
• 13:56
  fault with the way he tended to rely on black stereotypes for
• 13:59
  comedic value. Since his Vine days, Batch has
• 14:02
  pivoted towards more mainstream Hollywood, starring in various
• 14:05
  comedy roles in film and TV. Meanwhile, Lily Pons was one of
• 14:10
  the most popular female Viners. In 2014, Lily became the first
• 14:14
  person to reach 1 billion loops on the platform and discredited
• 14:17
  with popularizing the phrase do it for the Vine.
• 14:20
  She also had a very public facing falling out with fellow
• 14:23
  Vine star Amanda Kearney after Amanda accused Lily of
• 14:26
  sabotaging her social media presence by deleting her popular
• 14:30
  posts. But of course, when she started
• 14:32
  on the platform, people were drawn to Lily because of her
• 14:34
  relatable content. Quote.
• 14:36
  Her first Vines were about how she was doing poorly in school,
• 14:39
  how she would cut corners to do something, or how she was not
• 14:42
  seen as the popular girl. Her father thought her work was
• 14:45
  brilliant and an extension of the kind of drawings he used to
• 14:48
  make to tell her story when she was little.
• 14:50
  She was making at least one, sometimes 2 Vines a day.
• 14:54
  Sarah Ellison reports for The Washington Post Much of her fine
• 14:57
  content was classic, relying on silly faces and sound effects
• 15:01
  for comedic value. She created videos that explored
• 15:03
  everything from how girls react to seeing a hot boy to the
• 15:06
  struggles of waking up for school in the morning.
• 15:09
  Since then, Lily has shifted her focus to platforms like YouTube
• 15:12
  and Instagram, and even appeared on Dancing With the Stars.
• 15:15
  However, one of her most viral moments post Fine was when she
• 15:18
  was accused of lying about donating her hair.
• 15:21
  It began when she posted a now deleted Instagram photo of
• 15:25
  herself with a new cropped hairstyle.
• 15:27
  While her friends and held up what appeared to be a long
• 15:29
  blonde ponytail, followers quickly noted that something
• 15:32
  felt off. Upon closer inspection, the
• 15:35
  ponytail was clearly hair extensions.
• 15:37
  A few days later, Lily addressed the controversy on Twitter,
• 15:40
  explaining that she had intended to donate her hair but couldn't
• 15:44
  because it had been colored. Brittany Furlin was another Vine
• 15:47
  success story. After struggling to break into
• 15:50
  mainstream Hollywood, she started making content on Vine,
• 15:53
  where she quickly gained a following for her skits and
• 15:56
  characters, including Natalie, Nature, the beekeeper and
• 15:59
  Martha. Like many other Viners, this
• 16:02
  success soon turned into a full time job for her.
• 16:04
  However, as time went on, social media celebrity began to take
• 16:08
  its toll. Quote I left Vine because it
• 16:10
  became more toxic for me than positive, Ferlin told E in a
• 16:14
  2019 episode of E True Hollywood Story.
• 16:17
  Now she is perhaps most well known for her marriage to Tommy
• 16:20
  Lee of Mötley Crüe and the ex-husband of Pamela Anderson.
• 16:24
  While many Vine stars are most famous for their time on the
• 16:27
  platform, several have successfully pivoted to other
• 16:30
  careers. The Paul brothers are a prime
• 16:33
  example. Although they shouldn't be seen
• 16:35
  as a blueprint for anyone, it's often forgotten that both Logan
• 16:39
  and Jake started as Viners before moving to YouTube and,
• 16:42
  more recently, professional boxing.
• 16:44
  They began posting on Vine in 2013, quickly amassing fans that
• 16:48
  evidently followed them across platforms.
• 16:51
  David Dobrik is another creator who began on Vine.
• 16:54
  While he wasn't the most popular on the platform, he would go on
• 16:57
  to collaborate with other notable Viners like Gabby
• 17:00
  Hannah, Jason Nash, and Liza Koshy, all of whom also broke
• 17:03
  out of the Vine bubble in one way or another.
• 17:06
  One aspect of Vine that undoubtedly shaped David's
• 17:09
  career trajectory is its quick paced format.
• 17:12
  The Vlog Squad content at its peak mirrored Vine style, with
• 17:15
  each clip being short, where David's videos often clocked in
• 17:19
  at 4 minutes and 20 seconds. While Vine became a stepping
• 17:22
  stone for many creators to move on to other opportunities, Vine
• 17:25
  itself was in shambles. Much has been said about the
• 17:28
  fall of Vine, with many commentators and experts putting
• 17:31
  it down to the lack of monetization strategies on the
• 17:34
  platform. However, another important, yet
• 17:37
  often overlooked aspect was how the platform treated creators.
• 17:42
  As Vines management failed to take the concerns of these
• 17:44
  influencers seriously. This encouraged many of Vines
• 17:47
  top creators to de prioritize Vine or move platforms,
• 17:51
  ultimately decreasing its cultural influence.
• 17:54
  The problems began to unfold as early as June 2013, when
• 17:58
  Instagram introduced video features that extended beyond
• 18:01
  Vine's six second limit. Surprisingly, the eight second
• 18:05
  format made a significant difference in building
• 18:07
  narratives and storylines. While Vine content often lacks
• 18:11
  the hallmarks of powerful storytelling, relying instead on
• 18:14
  absurdity, pranks, and sound bites, the increased video
• 18:17
  length allowed for greater creativity and flexibility for
• 18:20
  creators on Instagram. Since Vine's demise, we've seen
• 18:23
  video based social media platforms significantly expand
• 18:26
  their content time limit. TikTok, for instance, now allows
• 18:30
  videos up to 30 minutes, epitomizing just how much the
• 18:33
  landscape has evolved. Quote.
• 18:35
  Former executives say that a major competitive challenge
• 18:38
  emerged in the form of Instagram.
• 18:40
  Casey Newton reports for The Verge.
• 18:42
  Instagram courted celebrities with longer videos, eventually
• 18:45
  bumping the limit up to a more flexible 60 seconds.
• 18:48
  Vines didn't break the six second barrier until 2016.
• 18:52
  On top of this, Vine faced ongoing monetization issues.
• 18:56
  A significant part of this stem from its user base, which was
• 18:59
  predominantly young and lacked substantial spending power.
• 19:02
  However, there were deeper problems within the platform's
• 19:05
  infrastructure. Vine never implemented anything
• 19:08
  like Tik Tok's Creator fund or YouTube's Adsense, meaning
• 19:11
  creators couldn't monetize their presence on the platform without
• 19:15
  securing brand deals. This not only hindered creators
• 19:18
  potential earnings but also posed challenges for brands as
• 19:21
  they couldn't purchase ad space on the platform and had to rely
• 19:24
  on organic growth or traffic generated by creators.
• 19:27
  As Newton ads for The Verge. When marketers started moving
• 19:30
  away from the platform to its competitors, especially with
• 19:33
  functions like the Instagram Explore page, which made
• 19:36
  discoverability easier than ever before, it only became a matter
• 19:39
  of time before the influencers followed suit.
• 19:43
  Huahasu shared a similar sentiment when reporting for The
• 19:45
  New Yorker quote. Twitter has also had a
• 19:48
  challenging time monetizing Vine's young amateur user base.
• 19:51
  Similar video sharing applications, especially
• 19:54
  Instagram and Snapchat, have been much shrewder at forging
• 19:57
  alliances with corporations and advertisers.
• 20:00
  Vines monetization issues and growing competition from other
• 20:03
  platforms were compounded by its internal instability.
• 20:06
  In 2014, for example, Dan Hoffman, one of Vines Co
• 20:10
  founders, stepped down from his role as general manager.
• 20:13
  Although his departure wasn't heavily discussed at the time,
• 20:16
  Hoffman decided to step back to focus on another startup.
• 20:19
  This shift in leadership contributed to Vines struggles,
• 20:22
  as the platform lacked the stable guidance needed to adapt
• 20:25
  to its rapidly evolving landscape.
• 20:28
  That being said, Mike Isaac, in his reporting for the New York
• 20:31
  Times, noted that this was a quote, significant blow for the
• 20:34
  company. According to three employee
• 20:36
  interviews, quote, Mr. Hoffman had provided the initial vision
• 20:39
  for the company. The employee said he was less
• 20:41
  worried about corporate process and more worried about their
• 20:44
  product. Isaac explained.
• 20:46
  Vine then entered a phase of leadership turnover that further
• 20:49
  hindered its success. Co founder Colin Kroll served as
• 20:52
  a general manager through 2014, but left later that year.
• 20:56
  By 2016 experienced a wave of executive departures, including
• 21:00
  another general manager of Vine, Jason Toff.
• 21:03
  Four months later, Hannah Donovan, former Co founder of
• 21:06
  the now defunct music service This Is My Jam, took over as the
• 21:10
  general manager. Of course, this constant change
• 21:12
  in leadership made it difficult for Vine to keep pace with some
• 21:15
  developments on competing platforms.
• 21:17
  Quote leadership turnover, not surprisingly, slowed product
• 21:21
  development, 4 employees said, and Vine quickly fell behind the
• 21:24
  fresher features of its competitors, like some of
• 21:26
  Instagram's GIF, like animated photos and trademark filters,
• 21:30
  Isaac continues for the New York Times.
• 21:33
  The managerial chaos at Vine didn't just impact the
• 21:36
  platform's ability to innovate, it also damaged its relationship
• 21:39
  with creators. Reports over the years have
• 21:42
  described the dynamic between Vines leadership and top
• 21:45
  influencers as ambivalent and even hostile.
• 21:48
  Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post notes that the Vines
• 21:51
  leading creators held significant sway over the type
• 21:54
  of content that thrived on the platform, largely due to its
• 21:58
  Revine feature, which acted as a repost button.
• 22:00
  By banding together and boosting each other's posts, these
• 22:03
  creators essentially controlled what went viral.
• 22:06
  This was particularly influential because this was
• 22:09
  before the era of widespread algorithm driven feeds, where
• 22:12
  content is served based on personal preferences.
• 22:15
  Interestingly, Lorenz points out that some of Vines management
• 22:18
  grew resentful towards the creators, feeling they had Co
• 22:21
  opted the platform and steered it in directions that clashed
• 22:24
  with the apps original vision. Quote flare ups between in the
• 22:27
  company and its biggest creators were common over even the
• 22:30
  smallest features. For instance, when Vine
• 22:33
  introduced web profiles and vanity URLs short, easy to
• 22:37
  remember links that allowed users to share their Vine
• 22:39
  profiles outside the app top Viners said they received no
• 22:42
  advance notice of the features roll out.
• 22:44
  The journalist continues. Things took a turn for the worse
• 22:47
  when creators began suspecting that management was deliberately
• 22:51
  preventing certain content from going viral.
• 22:53
  Reportedly, this wasn't just paranoia, according to Lorenz
• 22:57
  quote the Co founders were curating what trended on the
• 23:00
  site. This kind of control over what
• 23:02
  gained traction frustrated many top creators who felt their
• 23:05
  content was being limited, ultimately fueling tension
• 23:08
  between them and Vine's leadership quote.
• 23:11
  This monopoly, in Vine's eyes, was especially problematic
• 23:14
  because the content produced at 1600 Vine was not what the
• 23:17
  company wanted to promote. The Viners jokes were often
• 23:20
  juvenile at best and frequently misogynistic, homophobic or
• 23:24
  racist, she continues. Vine did try to salvage its
• 23:28
  relationship with creators, but by then it was too late.
• 23:31
  The top Viners could easily take their audiences to other
• 23:34
  platforms that not only valued their content but also offered
• 23:38
  monetization opportunities. On October 27th, 2016, Twitter
• 23:42
  announced that it was shutting Vine down and the platform was
• 23:45
  officially discontinued in January 2017.
• 23:49
  Quote. In the end, Vine proved too
• 23:51
  expensive to keep running, Isaac adds.
• 23:53
  For the New York Times. The app was costing about $10
• 23:56
  million a month for structure and employees, according to two
• 23:59
  former employees. When Twitter began to take stock
• 24:02
  of its business and decided which assets to trim down, Vine
• 24:06
  was at the top of the list. Nearly eight years since it was
• 24:09
  officially discontinued, short form video is more relevant than
• 24:13
  ever, proving that Vine was truly ahead of its time.
• 24:16
  Vine's impact on the online entertainment landscape is
• 24:19
  undeniable. The service introduced
• 24:21
  millennials and Gen. Z to the art of short form video
• 24:25
  and a host of early digital creators, many of whom are still
• 24:28
  relevant today. But after only a few short years
• 24:31
  at the top, Vine's inability to monetize its platform and
• 24:35
  prioritize creator growth would be its downfall.
• 24:38
  Vine's failure taught the industry a valuable lesson in
• 24:41
  prioritizing creator happiness and financial stability.
• 24:44
  Following Vine's demise, existing platforms like
• 24:47
  Instagram and YouTube put more protections in place to serve
• 24:50
  creators, such as monetization and stronger discoverability
• 24:54
  features, while new platforms like TikTok implement creator
• 24:58
  funding programs and support almost from the jump.
• 25:01
  These features are imperative to the success of every social
• 25:04
  media platform we know today, and even more importantly, they
• 25:08
  are imperative to the success of the creator economy at large.
• 25:12
  And perhaps despite all the takeaways from Vines steep rise
• 25:16
  and fall, that one lesson will be Vines legacy for decades to
• 25:21
  come. Infinite Scroll is a podcast
• 25:23
  produced, presented and Co written by me, Lauren Meisner
• 25:26
  for Centennial World. This episode was researched and
• 25:29
  written by Annabelle Ben David. Editing is by Danny Fennick.
• 25:32
  Thank you so much for listening. I love you guys and I will talk
• 25:35
  to you next week. Bye.