What Happened To Vine?

Anyone around in the 2010s couldn’t go far without hearing a reference to the app Vine, which allowed users to post six-second videos. In fact, the app was so impactful that Vine compilation videos are still getting millions of views. But what happened to Vine?

Why Did Vine Shut Down?

Entrepreneurs Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll founded Vine in June 2012, and the good people at Twitter – before it was owned by Elon Musk – quickly took notice. They bought the company for $30 million and helped it launch its iOS app in January 2013 and Android version in June 2013. It didn’t take long for Vine to take off, as it presented an interesting alternative to video services like YouTube.

The biggest group to benefit from Vine were comedians. They found a way to place fantastic jokes and bits into the six-second videos, skyrocketing the app into one of the most popular in the world. Some of the notable figures to get their start on the platform include KingBach, Logan Paul, Lele Pons, and Brittany Furlan.

Unfortunately, while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it’s not great in the business world. Soon after the launch of Vine, Instagram and Snapchat launched their own short-form video formats. YouTube followed suit, launching its GIF creator tool in 2014, which, funnily enough, allowed users to take six seconds of a video and turn it into a GIF.

Related: What Happened To Toys ‘R’ Us?

It didn’t take long for brands and companies to move their marketing to other services, and while Vine did its best to survive in an oversaturated market, the writing was on the wall. As part of layoffs in October 2016, Twitter announced that it would be shutting down the Vine app in the coming months.

Twitter tried to keep Vine around in a few different ways, even launching an archive of all of its videos, but nothing would stick. But while the original app was gone by 2017, in 2018, Hoffman announced a successor known as Byte. However, it failed to take off as many of Vine’s massive creators had already moved on.

While Vine has never been truly replaced, the rise of TikTok has sort of filled the void. Videos can be a lot longer than six seconds, but there’s plenty of witty comedy on the app, and other genres of videos have started to take off. TikTok is sort of a one-stop shop for content, which is something Vine probably could have benefited from being.