Vine Shuts Down

Jenni Mies

AP Econ

Mrs. Straub

11/29/16

Vine Shuts Down

The popular app, Vine, which enables users to record and post six second looping videos has reported that they are shutting down only three years after its launch date back in January, 2013. Although the exact date of shut down isn’t known, users have already expressed their concerns about saving their videos before the app is shut down for good. Vine started off strong as they became the number one app on the iTunes App Store only six months after joining the company. Vine has created new stars like Cameron Dallas, Brent Rivera and Lele Pons, with just naming a few. Most of these popular Viners have already moved out of the vining community  into other more profitable and popular social medias for example Instagram, YouTube and muscial.ly.

Vine, being owned by another popular social media base, Twitter, has been moved into the shadows of the more popular partner app. Twitter has regularly been posting about when the app will be shut down and have already announced that the website will still be up, enabling Vine fans to re-live all the incredible Vines posted in the past couple years. The announcement of the Vine app being deleted came after Twitter revealed their plans to lay off nine percent of their workforce which is approximately 350 workers. According to CNN money, Twitter posted a net loss of $103 million during their third-quarter report. Dropping Vine will decrease their net loss and/ or increase their profit.

A theory that has been proposed as to why Vine is shutting down is that it has been more of a loss to the company than a profit. Evidence that backs up this theory is that when competing app Instagram launched their video feature, Vine never recovered. Vine lost both users and market share to Instagram. It was then that many popular Viners jumped ship towards more profitable apps and left Vine vacant. As you can seen in the graph shown below, when Topsy’s analysis ran a check for Twitter links to Vine and Instagram, it revealed a large Vine drop-off right around the time that Instagram launched their new video feature. Based on the graph, there is no evidence that suggests that Vine will recover as the number of links to Vine.co in steadily decreasing.

A second theory as reported by The New York Times, is that Vine was dead weight. Mr. Isaac, tech reporter for The New York Times has concluded that, “If you have an entire division of your company that doesn’t make money and is a real resource drain, that’s hard to justify keeping it up and running.” Vine had more than 200 million active users at one point but has recently been struggling to maintain traction as the company saw a decline in popularity due to an increase in the demand of other competing apps.

Vine had its “fifteen minutes of fame” or in this case three years of fame and is now ready for its shut down to cut down on company costs. The company's goal is to have Twitter become profitable independently. If you are really upset about the announcement of Vine shutting down, realize that in the long run it will help the company as a whole.

Works Cited

Bambenek, Cadence. "Meet the 30 Top Vine Stars in the World." Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 28 June 2016. Web. 17 Nov. 2016. http://www.businessinsider.com/30-top-vine-stars-in-the-world-2016-6#7-logan-paul-24.

Rogers, Katie. "Vine Is Closing Down, and the Internet Can’t Stand It." The New York Times. The New York Times, 27 Oct. 2016. Web. 17 Nov. 2016. http://heavy.com/tech/2016/10/when-is-vine-video-app-closing-shutting-down-discontinuing-date-access-account-saving-downloading-vines-twitter/.

The Layoffs Are Expected to Impact about 350 Employees across Sales. "Twitter Cuts 9% of Staff and Kills off Vine App." CNNMoney. Cable News Network. Web. 17 Nov. 2016. http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/27/technology/twitter-layoffs-earnings/.

"When Is Vine Video App Closing?" Heavy.com. 27 Oct. 2016. Web. 17 Nov. 2016.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/technology/vine-is-closing-down-and-the-internet-can

-stand-it.html?_r=0.

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