Why Vine died

“A couple of things plagued Vine, and it all stems from the same thing, which is a lack of unity and leadership on a vision,” said Ankur Thakkar, who was Vine’s head of editorial from 2014 until May of this year. He told me he was proud of the work the app did to highlight rising stars, including Ruth B, who earned a record deal after his team gave... See more

Years of executive churn likely contributed to Vine’s failure to make money. For a while, brands were happy to pay Vine stars directly to make ads and share them to their millions of followers. But after Snapchat and Instagram grew into hundreds of millions of daily users, marketers’ interest in Vine dropped significantly.

Meanwhile Snapchat, which allowed users to send each other 10-second video clips and (later) broadcast them publicly, ultimately became the casual mass-market lifecasting app that Vine’s founders had once pitched their product to Twitter as. When other platforms surged ahead, some Vine stars began negotiating to be paid to post on the service. But ... See more

Former executives say that a major competitive challenged emerged in the form of Instagram, which introduced 15-second video clips in June 2013. “Instagram video was the beginning of the end,” one former executive told me. “[Vine] didn’t move fast enough to differentiate.” Instagram courted celebrities with longer videos, eventually bumping the lim... See more