The Death of Vine and What it Means for Twitter

Photo+courtesy+of+CNN+Money.

Photo courtesy of CNN Money.

Janine Jones, Copy Editor

A moment of silence for the app that made a bunch of six second videos feel like a lifetime of memories.

Twitter discontinued the Vine mobile app. The announcement, posted on Medium, came after Twitter’s reported quarterly earnings that revealed the social media company was struggling to make money.

Twitter also said that they would be cutting 350 jobs, or nine percent of their workforce. Twitter acquired the app before its release in 2013 and spawned the short video movement that has continued success for Snapchat and Instagram.

The announcement said that “in the coming months” Vine will be going away, but the Vines themselves will continue to exist through the website so they can still be accessed and downloaded.

Vine spawned stars like singer Shawn Mendes and comedian King Bach, who is part of MTV’s Wild ‘n Out. So it’s a downer for those like them who came a long way and made careers out of their six second fame.

Vine was struggling, however, to keep up in an ever-changing market, even with 200 million monthly users (or more accurately, viewers).

So, what went wrong?

Blame Instagram. After Instagram added their video component a few years back, Vine never really recovered. The use for an app that was solely dedicated to short videos faded when people could now post photos and videos on the same social media platform. Many of the popular viners spread their content among other platforms and Vine got left behind. 

Vine was a one hit wonder. The whole idea of the app is that it’s like a Twitter with video and audio. But after a while Vine got repetitive. You started seeing people do remakes of other viners videos and began wondering what happened to all the original content. Besides, how many times can one possibly do ‘it’ for the Vine?

Promotions are killer, literally. Viners became a little obsessed with making money and trying to sell us things that they forgot to be funny. Vine went from being an app with a lot of hilarious videos to an app full of commercials.

Vine’s demise has been in the works for a while. No one wanted to forget about Vine, it just kind of happened that way. It’s like losing a friend that you forgot you had.

Do it for the Vine? We can’t. Vine’s dead.