Twitter to shut down Vine
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Video sharing app bites the dust after four years of viral content
By Amber McLinden, Staff Writer
After four short years, Vine is getting shut down. You heard correctly, folks. The looping video app announced on Oct. 27 that the service would be discontinued. While users can still view and download vines, no new updates will be provided and nobody will be able to post content. In the past four years, Vine has created several iconic memes that influenced popular culture in an unchangeable way.
So what happened to the beloved meme incubator that birthed such iconic videos like “Why the f*ck you lyin’” and “Peanut butter baby?” To put it simply, it just wasn’t making any money. Twitter, the owner of Vine, is already struggling to fund itself let alone Vine. Advertisers simply didn’t see the value of selling ads to Vine and therefore the app was unable to keep itself up and running.
Vine stars came to this realization as well. Big Vine names like King Bach, Brittany Furlan, Logan Paul and others started signing contracts and advertising with platforms like Facebook where they knew they could make money. In fact, top viners realized the app was dying and drew up a contract to try and save it.
Mic Network reported on Oct. 29 that Marcus Johns, one top viner, and a group of 21 others held a meeting with the company explaining that they were driving almost all the app’s traffic and demanded to be compensated. Unfortunately, Vine was not generating the revenue that they thought. So began the end of an era.
“We were driving billions of views — billions — before we left,” Vine star DeStorm Power told Mic. “The word Vine became shorthand for short sketch-comedy videos. We did that. Vine didn’t do that. We changed culture by making videos on this six-second app.”
Vine generated cultural significance for a while, and slowly phased out of relevance. Many careers were actually born on Vine, like popular Canadian singer/songwriter Shawn Mendes. By capitalizing on the fact that no other app had included short video posting at the time, they created a unique purpose. Now, Instagram has the feature as well as Snapchat, and the app has done nothing to stay innovative.
Constantly innovating is part of playing the game, as other platforms have demonstrated. While sites like Twitter have not been as profitable as traditional corporations, they manage to stay afloat by constantly moving forward and progressing, but couldn’t do the same for Vine.
That’s definitely not “on fleek.” As most millennials can attest to, Vine has at least established its cultural importance, regardless of your opinion on the internet anomaly that is memes. If you’ve ever been the victim of a “What are those!” or laughed at a six-second video on Facebook of Drake doing his Hotline Bling dance, you can thank Vine.
While Vine is ending, people can look to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube if they want to keep up with their favourite Vine stars. Most Viners have been posting links to alternate forms of social media so that their fans can continue watching past the demise of Vine. Thanks for four years of hilarious jokes and terrible trends (anyone remember Magcon?). You will be missed.