The Surprising Demise Of Vine

 

I first realized that Vine was a thing when I visited my friend and her 13-year old daughter was doubled over on the couch in laughter. She was completely engrossed by what I thought were bizarre 6-second clips. When she showed me what had her in hysterics, I’ll admit, I shook my fist at the cloud and yelled “Get off my (digital) lawn!”

Vine was not for me, but it was undoubtedly a powerful, creative platform for millions of people. After it was acquired by Twitter, many thought it would become the YouTube to Twitter’s Google. Alas, Twitter’s woes befell Vine, and the platform was never able to monetize its own services, despite the fact that Vine “stars” were making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then Snapchat came along, and Instagram released their video functionality.

fwiw: was told many times Vine never recovered from Instagram video launch. that threat of stealing users and share was real, and worked.

— ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) October 27, 2016

And Vine never recovered.

Despite all of that, I never expected Vine to be the service that Twitter offs, but sure enough, yesterday, Twitter announced that it was shipping Vine off to the digital graveyard (say hello to MySpace for us, Vine!) and thousands lamented its loss (including their founder, who, to be fair, can weep into his millions).

Don’t sell your company!

— Rus (@rus) October 27, 2016

All of this is a long way of saying: You should read Maya Kosoff’s behind-the-scenes look at how Vine went from the talk of the town to the digital graveyard in SUCH a short amount of time (seriously, just 2 years??).

There’s a lot to learn from Kosoff’s article. But in the meantime, we’ll just keep watching this.

Rock on, little puppy!

By Katy L.