Goodbye Vine?

R.I.P. Vine 
Courtesy of wersm.com

R.I.P. Vine Courtesy of wersm.com

Vine, the master of six second video loops, is now coming to an end. Say goodbye to your favorite Vines or becoming a Vine star yourself. The Vine mobile app is being discontinued sometime in the next few months, and a lot of us are a little reluctant to let go.

Twitter acquired Vine in 2012 and launched in 2013, becoming massively famous for pioneering six second videos socially. Terms like “Just do it for the Vine” became a thing to get others to dance in public, or do a humiliatingly hilarious stunt to record in public, even if it was at the cost of your own safety.

Vine stars started having their own conventions, collaborations and projects, so they could boost their fan bases. Now, with Vine becoming increasingly less popular, Vine stars are taking over Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram,  and Facebook to keep their fans happy and make sure they stay popular and in the public eye.

For now, the app, the website, and existing Vines are still available. “We value you, your Vines, and are going to do this the right way,” Twitter says “You’ll be able to access and download all of your Vines.”

“We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made. You will be notified before we make any changes to the app or website.” Twitter said in an article published on Medium.

The plan seems to be that after the app is discontinued, the website will still be available and accessible to download all your videos. You just won’t be able to make or upload any new ones to your account.

Because Vine is being shut down, they are letting go of over 300 employees. Twitter can’t afford to keep their employees or Vine because of one big reason: they have no money. While they aren’t bankrupt, Twitter hasn’t exactly been profitable. They’ve been trying to sell, yet no one seems willing to buy.

After Instagram launched 15 second videos in 2013, Vine never recovered because everyone quit using Vine and started using Instagram to promote their videos. Instagram became even more popular because it had everything a social media star could ever possibly want all in one place.

Once Vine stars realized that Vine was becoming less popular mostly all of them (except for the few who stayed loyal) jumped ship, taking the opportunity to make more money and enlarge their fan base by using other social media platforms. With the Vine stars leaving, there was no more new content and advertising being uploaded anymore.

With only six seconds to promote yourself, advertisers didn’t much care for Vine.  Since they didn’t have longer to promote themselves, they didn’t really see much of a need for Vine, and turned to other social media that had a larger platform for them to promote themselves like YouTube and Facebook.