Dead End: Vine

Abstract

Vine launched on 24 January 2013 as a Twitter-owned app for six-second looping videos and had 40 million registered users seven months later. It produced the grammar of short-form video comedy and the first generation of performers who were famous to millions of teenagers without a studio, a network, or any income from the platform they worked on. In late 2015 eighteen of the top fifty asked Twitter to pay them; Twitter declined, and they left. Twitter announced the shutdown on 27 October 2016, the same morning it cut 9% of its staff. Five years later ByteDance was running the same format at a billion users a month.

The Six-Second Constraint

Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll founded Vine in June 2012. Every clip was at most six seconds long and looped automatically. Users filmed by holding a finger on the screen; lifting it paused recording; pressing again resumed. That mechanism, rather than any editing software, produced the format’s grammar: jump cuts stitched in the camera, with the cut itself as the joke.

Twitter bought the company in October 2012 for about $30 million, three months before the app existed publicly. Vine shipped on iOS on 24 January 2013 and on Android on 2 June 2013.

Six seconds came out of testing rather than theory. The team tried longer and shorter limits before settling. Asked by NPR whether he had woken up one morning knowing six seconds was right, Hofmann joked: “One day we did wake up and say, six seconds.” Six was short enough that a phone and no skill were sufficient, and short enough that viewers rewatched instead of skipping. Video was square, 480 by 480 pixels, until a 720p upgrade in 2015. According to Tad Friend’s reporting in the New Yorker, the app did not take off until April 2013, when Vine added front-facing camera support and users turned it on themselves.

The Cultural Peak

On 9 April 2013 Vine was the most downloaded free app in the iOS App Store. Twitter reported 13 million iOS users that June, and by August 2013 Vine had 40 million registered users.

The platform built its own star system, concentrated to an unusual degree in one building: 1600 Vine Street in Los Angeles, an apartment complex where King Bach (Andrew Bachelor), Marcus Johns, Curtis Lepore, Logan Paul and others lived and shot in each other’s living rooms and around the pool. Johns was the first Viner past a million followers. Bach had nine million by December 2014 and over sixteen million by March 2015. Lele Pons, Nash Grier and the singer Shawn Mendes built audiences of millions on the same six seconds.

Phrases and gags from the app outlasted it: “road work ahead,” “what are those,” “it is Wednesday my dudes.” Compilations of Vines circulated on YouTube and Facebook long after the service was gone, which is where most people under twenty-five have actually seen them.

The Format Innovation

The loop was borrowed from GIF culture and applied to video with sound and a capture tool. It changed the metric. On YouTube the question was completion rate; on Vine a strong post was one watched five or six times in a row, and creators built for that deliberately. Bach packed eight shots into a single Jordan-sneaker Vine, knowing viewers would have to loop it repeatedly to catch everything, which drove his numbers up. That Vine was viewed 41 million times.

Instagram Answers with Fifteen Seconds

On 20 June 2013 Kevin Systrom announced video for Instagram at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park: fifteen seconds, thirteen filters, image stabilisation. Vine shipped a batch of features the same morning.

The effect on Vine’s distribution was immediate and measurable, because Vine’s distribution ran through Twitter. Topsy counted nearly 2.9 million Vine links shared on Twitter on 15 June 2013. On 21 June, the day after Instagram’s launch, it counted 1.35 million, and under 900,000 by the end of that week. Vine kept adding users, but the app that had spread by filling other people’s timelines now had a competitor with 130 million monthly users and video built in.

Creators Without Revenue

Vine never paid creators. YouTube had run its Partner Program since 2007; Vine had no equivalent at any point in its four years, which put its stars outside the arrangement that was becoming standard elsewhere (see The Creator Economy).

So the stars sold themselves directly. Brittany Furlan, with 8.9 million followers, was paid as much as $20,000 for a branded Vine for clients like Trident; the going rate rose by roughly $5,000 per additional million followers, and Rob Fishman of the branding agency Niche put full campaigns at $20,000 to $50,000. King Bach’s steadiest platform income came from somewhere else entirely: fans re-uploaded his Vines to YouTube, and the ads on those re-uploads paid him ten to fifteen thousand dollars a month. The money for Vine content was being made on Google’s advertising system, on a competitor’s site, by people who had not made the videos.

This worked for perhaps two dozen people. Everyone else was producing for an audience and receiving nothing.

The Meeting at 1600 Vine Street

In the autumn of 2015, eighteen of Vine’s fifty biggest creators gathered in a conference room at 1600 Vine Street to meet Karyn Spencer, Vine’s creative development lead. Marcus Johns and Piques organised it; Johns drafted the contract. The terms: Vine would pay each of the eighteen $1.2 million, fix a list of product complaints, and open a direct line to the creators. In exchange each would post twelve original videos a month, three a week, for a year. If Vine refused, the top of the platform would walk.

The product asks were as pointed as the money. The creators wanted moderation of the abuse filling their comments, links in captions, a better recommendation page, and working editing tools. “People on Vine would bash people for no reason,” Piques said. Vine’s representatives said they would take the contract back to Twitter. Word spread and the roster grew to twenty-one.

Twitter said no. “At that point, we knew Vine was dead,” one attendee told Mic. Nearly every major Viner stopped posting originals or cut back sharply, moving to YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, where the audience infrastructure and the brand-deal market were larger. Between January and June 2016, more than half of Vine’s users with over 15,000 followers stopped uploading or deleted their accounts.

Vine had, shortly before the meeting, thrown a rooftop party in Los Angeles to crown King Bach the platform’s most-followed creator. The group chat the next day turned on the obvious question of why the money went to the party.

Inside Twitter

None of the founders were there for the end. Hofmann and Kroll stepped out of day-to-day operations in 2014, Kroll after being fired as general manager. Yusupov was laid off in October 2015 in Jack Dorsey’s restructuring, the last of the three still at the company. By late 2015 the app’s design was overseen by Vine’s head of user experience, Jason Mante.

Twitter was meanwhile making three bets on video at once: native video uploads in its own app, Vine, and Periscope, the live-streaming startup it bought in January 2015 for a reported $120 million and launched that March. Twitter went public on 7 November 2013 and spent the following three years explaining slowing user growth to investors. Vine served none of the metrics that argument depended on. Its users did not particularly need Twitter, and the integration between the two never went much past posting a link.

The Shutdown

On 27 October 2016 Twitter published third-quarter results, announced it was cutting about 9% of its workforce, roughly 350 jobs, and posted a note on Medium saying the Vine mobile app would be discontinued “in the coming months”. The post promised the website would stay up and existing Vines would remain downloadable; it named no date for anything.

Yusupov found out from a reporter who called him that morning. He tweeted three words: “Don’t sell your company!”

Uploads ended on 17 January 2017, when the app was replaced by Vine Camera, which shot six-second loops for posting to Twitter. A searchable archive of every Vine went online on 20 January 2017, was no longer supported by 2019, and stopped serving video around January 2025. Colin Kroll died of a drug overdose in New York on 16 December 2018, aged 34, while running HQ Trivia, the company he had founded with Yusupov after Vine.

What TikTok Did Next

Musical.ly launched in Shanghai in August 2014, founded by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. Its videos ran fifteen seconds to a minute and its central mode was lip-sync rather than the loop, but its demography was Vine’s: teenagers performing to camera. It had 90 million registered users by June 2016, while Vine’s stars were leaving, and over 200 million by May 2017.

ByteDance bought Musical.ly on 9 November 2017 for a price reported between $800 million and $1 billion, and merged it into TikTok on 2 August 2018. TikTok then paid: a Creator Fund, a brand-deal marketplace, live-streaming gifts, and an algorithmic feed that could take an unknown account to millions of views in a day without an existing follower base. TikTok announced one billion monthly active users on 27 September 2021. ByteDance shares changed hands in 2021 at prices implying a valuation near $400 billion, though those trades were anonymous secondary-market listings on 36Kr and were never confirmed by the company.

Instagram launched Reels in August 2020 and YouTube launched Shorts in beta in India in September 2020 and in the United States in March 2021, both aimed at TikTok.

Hofmann announced a Vine successor called v2 in November 2017, postponed it indefinitely in May 2018 over legal and financial obstacles, renamed it Byte that November, and shipped it on 24 January 2020, seven years to the day after Vine’s iOS launch. Byte paid its creators from the start. It was acquired by the short-video app Clash on 26 January 2021, merged into it, later renamed Huddles, and discontinued on 3 May 2023.

Dead End

Vine proved the format and never owned the business built on it. The proof was expensive to produce and the app captured almost none of the value: brands paid creators directly, YouTube’s ad system monetised the re-uploads, and Twitter monetised none of it.

The eighteen creators at 1600 Vine Street were asking for $21.6 million in total. Twitter’s revenue for the quarter in which it killed Vine was $616 million. The company’s judgment was that the audience belonged to the platform and would stay when the performers left. The audience left with them.

TikTok’s format is not Vine’s: full-screen vertical video, up to a minute at launch and far longer since, sound-first, sorted by an algorithm rather than by who you follow. What it took from Vine was the six-second comic unit and the discovery that teenagers with phones would supply an entire entertainment industry’s worth of content. What it added was a way for them to get paid for it.