Vine is dead. Short video isn't
Twitter is shutting down Vine. It didn't lose because six-second videos were a bad idea.
Twitter announced on Thursday that it’s shutting down the Vine app in the coming months. Vine is less than four years old. It had a huge cultural footprint for its size. A lot of the internet’s jokes from 2013 to 2015 started there, along with a generation of comedians who are now famous elsewhere.
The easy explanation is that six seconds was a gimmick and people moved on. I don’t think that’s right. Musical.ly, which a lot of people over 25 have never opened, has an enormous young audience making 15-second lip-sync videos. Snapchat stories are short video. Instagram added video in 2013 and has grown it steadily. People haven’t lost interest in short video. If anything they watch more of it every year.
I think Vine lost on two other things.
The first is creators. Vine’s biggest stars had millions of followers and no way to make money on the platform. There was no revenue share and no real tools for brand deals. So they did what anyone would do and moved to YouTube and Instagram, where they could get paid, and took their audiences with them. Late last year a group of the top Viners reportedly asked Vine for money and features to keep posting, and it didn’t happen. When your supply of content is a few thousand people, losing them is fatal.
The second is the feed. Vine’s feed was mostly who you follow, plus a popular page. If you weren’t already following good people, the app was boring, and new users had to do work to make it interesting. Musical.ly and a few apps coming out of China seem to work the other way: the app watches what you actually watch, and figures out what to show you with very little input from you. In short video, where each piece of content takes seconds to judge, that kind of feed can learn your taste very fast.
So my prediction is that short video comes back bigger than Vine ever was. Whoever builds it will pay creators or give them a real business, and will have a recommendation engine that doesn’t depend on who you follow. Good editing tools in the app would help too, since most people have no idea how to make six seconds interesting. The format was fine all along. Twitter just didn’t build the rest of the business around it.