We are carrying on with stories that inspire, and with the things to watch before you go claiming ground with a project of your own. Here we look at where Vine went wrong, a magnificent idea that a run of bad moves sent to the graveyard of dead projects. It would be fair to say a good many of the influencers who are famous on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok today grew up on Vine.

On an internet where sharing images was thought to be enough, Vine gave people the chance to share 6 second videos and became, around 2013, the most downloaded app in the world for a while. Vine reached 200 million active users and inspired a great many projects that came after it. Today it is closed.

1. Pressure From Rivals, and Standing Still

Let us be honest: Vine’s first and largest mistake was getting comfortable.

  • Instagram’s move into video: Instagram added 15 second video in 2013 and walked straight into Vine’s territory. Vine was slow to develop the platform radically in the face of that threat.
  • There was no way to make money: it never built a system (revenue sharing on ads, that sort of thing) that let creators earn from the platform. Which is what drove talented creators with large followings over to YouTube and Instagram.

2. Neglecting the Community

It was the creators who made Vine popular. But:

  • The line went dead: the platform turned a deaf ear to what its creators were asking for and what they needed. Vine’s biggest stars complained about getting no support and no recognition from the company. Not listening to its own stars in that final stretch, and failing to communicate with them, is what landed the last blow. The great Vine exodus.
  • The stars walked: the platform’s most popular names left for rivals offering better income, more features and better communication, and that burned through Vine’s pull on its audience fast.

3. User Experience and Features

Vine got stuck inside a format as tight as 6 seconds. It had no answer to Instagram’s 15 second videos.

  • Content started repeating: because the format was so tight, the content began repeating itself before long.
  • Weak editing tools: while rival platforms offered filters, music and editing tools, Vine settled for simple, inadequate ones and could not keep pace.

The upshot: Vine’s story shows that a magnificent start is not enough for a project. Holding market share takes constant development, partnership with your creators and fast adaptation. Vine could not hold those three cornerstones, and the project could not escape the scrap heap.

What People Thought of Vine at the Time

Associate Professor Tamer Bayrak wrote an academic paper called “VINE AS A SOCIAL NETWORK APPLICATION”, and set down these notes about Vine.

Vine, the fastest growing application in the world among social sharing platforms at a rate of 403%, also pays attention to the feedback it receives from its users. Presented as the video version of Twitter, this application again at its users’ request does not permit sexual content, which makes it a very good example of the concept of new media. Unlike on Instagram, Vine users generally display their creativity through the videos they shoot.

In this application, where users lean toward comic creativity, there are people whose videos reach a very large number of users. These people are called phenomena and their videos are followed by wide audiences. This draws the attention of advertisers as well, and they sign advertising agreements with them. By opening a source of income to its users, Vine adds another dimension to the concept of new media. In order to analyze the Vine application properly in this sense, an interview was conducted with Nejat Uygur, one of the phenomena of this application. In that interview his personal views were taken on the design of the Vine software, its features, its content, what it brings him and the future of the software.

Nejat Uygur, one of the phenomena of this software and a constant user of it, is in continuous contact with the application in order to display his creativity and follow his videos, unlike ordinary users who simply watch videos and close the app. The interview therefore made it possible to look at the Vine software from every angle. According to Nejat Uygur the design of the Vine software (logo, color, typefaces and so on) carries no importance for users, while its content and features matter a great deal. For example, video length being limited to 6 seconds is, according to Nejat Uygur, sufficient, and

it develops users’ creativity. He points to the importance of sincerity, of not being artificial and of keeping the content rich, ahead of creativity itself, in video sharing. For that reason he sees the time limit such applications place on videos as an advantage. In this context, consumption speed, one of the things new media brought with it, is observed to have turned into an advantage for social media users.

A Closer Look

Through the idea of consumption speed, Tamer Bayrak captured that period in his paper very well. Vine had been bought by Twitter and it was one of the good ideas of its day. But the constant changes of CEO never produced success. People had already consumed Vine, and there was nothing new coming.

The lesson here is this: do not think about sustainability inside fixed patterns. The strongest player in a project’s sustainability is novelty itself. A solid foundation matters, but the one thing that matters more is staying current, working in harmony with the technology of the day.

We Went Through Every Social Platform of the Past

Lately a team under Gül Dinç, inside Türk SEM but working independently of it, has been running various projects at Xer.com.tr. They put YouTube on the table and they have some nice ideas, “Digital Traj” among them. They would like Xer.com.tr to become a central operation in social media advertising. Which is why we are reading academic papers on social media and going through the literature.

Vine is one of those stories where the more you read, the more you think: how influential it was back then, and why is it gone now? Because; it handed Instagram a concept, it inspired TikTok, and it was making YouTube Shorts style videos long before any of them.

Conclusion

The most successful project of today starts with reading the gaps correctly and carries on with a plan for sustainability. If you believe you have understood the gap in your sector and you believe in your project, do not be afraid to take the step. If Colin Kroll, Rus Yusupov and Dom Hofmann had not done something wild and quit their jobs that day, Vine might never have existed at all.