What happened to vine?
CORRINA
Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. That’s what happened to Vine. It failed to face the onslaught from these services in time and it got bowled over. Started in June 2012 it came at a time when memes were rampant on the Internet. Creative kids got busy and created comedy gold. The legacy is still alive and those 6-second videos are still funny. But Vine is like a distant memory now. It had its time where it gave people an opportunity to explore their creativity and then it died.
Twitter acquired the New-York based startup in October of that year for $30 million. An app was launched for iOS on 24th January 2013. By June an Android app came and the rest is history. People used the loop to make gifs with sound. Vine was intended by its users to be platform where users could share casual 6-second clips about their day to day lives. But instead it became a tool of creativity and weirdness. People took the 6-second limit as a challenge and pushed the bounds of unpredictability. What the world got through that was amazing content.
But they put all their eggs in one basket. In June 2013 Instagram allowed users to post 15-second videos. Snapchat with its disappearing videos and chats offered a new novelty. It became the casual video sharing app that the creators of Vine had aimed for. The end was near.
At the end of the day, any social media platform is successful because of the people on it. And to keep people visiting it you need content. Content comes from content creators. And if they get famous enough the ball shifts to their court. You need to keep them happy. YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat do it. Vine didn’t. Vine had a range of weird and creative people creating unforgettable memes but they didn’t keep them happy. So they gradually started shifting to other platforms. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook live and even YouTube.
The fall came on 27th October 2016. Twitter was shutting down the Vine app and it gave its users the opportunity to download the content before it did for use elsewhere. The website and the app, renamed Vine Camera, would be available to the users for viewing and download but not for posting. 17th January 2017 was the day of the execution. It was stayed by another day giving users a final chance to download their content.
Twitter couldn’t sustain the cost and Vine couldn’t sustain its users. The competition eventually won and the internet and Vine’s users lost a treasure. RIP Vine. You will be remembered.
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