Vine

What did it do?

Vine was a short-video service on which users shot and shared looping clips of up to six seconds. Because the app's camera recorded only while the screen was being touched, users could edit in camera and create stop-motion effects as they filmed. Vine played an important part in the rise of a new generation of social media stars and of collaborative content creation.

Why did it shut down?

When Instagram launched 15-second video sharing in 2013, competition in short video intensified. Vine's star creators moved to platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat; in the first half of 2016 more than half of users with over 15,000 followers stopped posting or deleted their accounts. Marketers pulling away from the platform also weighed heavily in Twitter's decision. Twitter announced in October 2016 that it would discontinue the app, and Vine was officially shut down on 17 January 2017.

The story

Only four months separate Vine's founding from its sale. The company, founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll in June 2012, was bought by Twitter for around USD 30 million in October 2012, before the app had even launched. Vine reached users with its iOS app on 24 January 2013; Android and Windows versions followed shortly afterwards.

The idea was simple: videos of up to six seconds, playing in an endless loop. Because the camera recorded only while the screen was being touched, users could edit as they filmed and experiment with stop motion. In April 2013 Vine reached the top of the free apps chart on the US App Store. Brands piled in quickly: in September 2013 Dunkin' Donuts became the first company to use a single Vine video as a television advert. By December 2015 Vine had more than 200 million active users, and the platform had become the birthplace of a new generation of social media stars.

Rivals, however, did not stand still. In June 2013 Instagram introduced 15-second video sharing, and Vine increasingly found itself competing with services such as Instagram and Snapchat for the same audience. The platform's most important asset, its creators, moved elsewhere: in the first half of 2016 more than half of users with over 15,000 followers stopped posting or deleted their accounts. Marketers drifting away from the platform also played a large part in Twitter's decision.

On 27 October 2016 Twitter announced that it would discontinue the Vine mobile app. On 17 January 2017 Vine officially closed, and the app became a camera tool for posting videos directly to Twitter. Three days later Twitter opened an online archive containing every Vine video published up to that point; the archive was closed in April 2018. According to The Verge, many well-known Vine users, including David Dobrik, Liza Koshy, Logan Paul and Lele Pons, moved to YouTube. Byte, the successor launched by co-founder Dom Hofmann in 2020, also closed in 2023.

Vine popularised the short-video format before services such as TikTok. Even so, it could not stop the exodus of the creators who had grown the platform, and it lost out to the heirs of the very format it had created.

Lessons for founders

• Regularly measure why the creators who grew your platform stay; the departure of your most popular users is an alarm that sounds before overall user numbers fall.
• A format constraint such as six seconds can set you apart, but once rivals copy the format you need a new advantage.
• A product living inside a large company depends on that company's priorities; in acquisition talks, pin down commitments about the product's future.

Sources

1. Vine (service) (Wikipedia)
2. Twitter axes Vine video service (BBC News, 2016-10-27)
3. Twitter officially shuts down Vine (CNNMoney, 2017-01-17)

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