History
Vine was founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll in June 2012. The company was acquired by Twitter in October 2012 for a reported $30 million.[12][13] It launched its iOS app on January 24, 2013,[14] with an Android version following on June 2, 2013.[15] On November 12, 2013, the application was released for Windows Phone.[16] In a couple of months, Vine became the most used video sharing application in the market, even with low adoption of the app.[17] On April 9, 2013, Vine became the most downloaded free app within the iOS App Store[18] and on May 1, 2014, Vine launched the web version of the service to explore videos.[19]
In July 2014, Vine updated its app with a new "loop count", meaning every time someone watched a vine, a number on top of the video would appear showing how many times it was viewed. The "loop count" also included views from vines that were embedded onto other websites.[20][21] On October 14, 2014, an Xbox One version was released allowing Xbox Live members to watch the looping videos.[22]
On October 27, 2016, Vine announced that Twitter would be discontinuing the Vine mobile app. Vine said users of the service would be notified before any changes to the app or website were made. The company also stated that the website and the app would still be available for users to view and download Vines, but users would no longer be able to post.[23]
The discontinuation of Vine came as many different competing platforms began to introduce their own equivalents to Vine's short-form video approach. Platforms such as Instagram began to introduce their own takes on the short video angle, such as Instagram Video where users were able to upload 15-second videos to their profiles.
Marketers leaving the platform was also a large part of the decision by Twitter to discontinue Vine. Many monetary sources began to move to longer short video platforms, and with them followed many popular Vine creators. Between January and June of 2016, more than half of Vine users with more than 15,000 followers ceased uploading or deleted their accounts to move on to other platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.[24]
On December 16, 2016, it was announced that the Vine mobile app would remain operational as a standalone service, allowing users to publish their videos directly to Twitter instead of Vine; the Vine community website would shut down in January.[25] On January 17, 2017, the app was renamed to "Vine Camera".[26] Although the app still enabled users to record six-second videos, they could only be shared on Twitter or saved on a camera roll.[27][28] The release of the Vine Camera was met with poor reviews on both the Android and iOS App Stores.[29] On January 20, 2017, Twitter launched an Internet archive of all Vine videos, allowing people to continue watching previously filmed Vine videos[30] however in 2019 this was also removed by Twitter.[10]
The Verge reported that the closure of Vine led many of its most notable users, such as Kurtis Conner, David Dobrik, Danny Gonzalez, Drew Gooden, Liza Koshy, Shawn Mendes, Jake Paul, Logan Paul, and Lele Pons, to move to YouTube.[31]
In November 2018, co-founder Dom Hoffman announced the upcoming successor to Vine, Byte, also previously known as V2; it was slated to come out in spring 2019.[32] The Byte application launched publicly a year later on January 24, 2020. In 2021, Vine has announced that they will discontinue their app.
After Elon Musk completed his purchase of social media company Twitter, he posted a poll on Twitter on October 30, 2022, whether to "Bring back Vine?".[33] It has received over 4.9 million votes, with the majority (69.6%) being in favor.[34] An Axios article published on October 31, 2022, stated that Musk purportedly requested Twitter engineers work on rebooting Vine.[35] On April 17, 2024, Musk posted the same poll on X (formerly Twitter) which accumulated nearly 2.3 million votes, with 69.6% being in favor.[36]
