Vine

Vine failed because Instagram drew off its stars and the marketers who paid them, The Verge reported from interviews with former executives, while Vine offered marketers no paid placement and was slow to help its stars make money. Twitter, cutting costs, announced the shutdown in October 2016 and later called Vine non-core.

What it was

Vine was a free app for making and sharing looping videos of six seconds or less.

Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll founded it in New York in June 2012. Twitter bought the three-person startup that October, before it had launched, AllThingsD reported. The Verge later put the price at a reported $30 million.

Its founders had pictured a way to share casual moments with friends, The Verge's Casey Newton wrote. Users took the six-second limit as a creative challenge instead, and Hofmann said it became clear "almost immediately" that Vine's culture "was going to shift towards creativity and experimentation."

What happened

Vine launched on January 24, 2013, on the iPhone and iPod touch, Twitter announced. In April 2013 it became the top free app in the US App Store, The Verge reported.

On June 20, 2013, Instagram added 15-second video. By the next day, Vine shares on Twitter were down by more than half from their peak on June 15, CNBC reported from Topsy data.

In August 2015, Vine said more than 200 million people watched Vines every month, citing Google Analytics.

That fall, 18 of Vine's top creators asked it to pay them $1.2 million each and make product changes, in exchange for 12 pieces of original content a month, Mic's Taylor Lorenz reported. The deal didn't go through, and nearly every major creator then stopped posting original work to Vine or cut back sharply, according to Mic.

In June 2016, Vine began testing videos of up to 140 seconds and said it was "exploring monetization opportunities for creators."

By July, over half of Vine's top 9,725 accounts had deleted their profiles or stopped posting since the start of the year, Business Insider reported, citing research by Makerly.

On October 27, 2016, the day Twitter announced it was cutting about 9% of its workforce, Vine said that "in the coming months we'll be discontinuing the mobile app." Co-founder Rus Yusupov, whom Twitter had laid off in October 2015, tweeted "Don't sell your company!", Business Insider reported.

In December, Vine said the app would become a "pared-down Vine Camera" that could post six-second loops to Twitter or save them to the phone.

On January 17, 2017, Twitter turned off sharing, liking, commenting and revining and released Vine Camera, TechCrunch reported. Three days later, Vine turned its website into an archive of the posts made there from 2013 to 2017.

Why it failed

Twitter gave no reason when it announced the shutdown and later called Vine non-core, while reporting blamed faster rivals and the stars and marketers who moved to them.

What Twitter said

The shutdown post gave no reason, and BBC News noted that Twitter "did not give a reason for the closure."

On the same day, Twitter's CFO, Anthony Noto, said the company would "fully invest in our highest priorities" and was "de-prioritizing certain initiatives." Its filing that day spoke of "eliminating investment in non-core areas," without naming Vine.

Twitter named it four months later. Its 2016 annual report said it had "eliminated investment in non-core areas of our business, like Vine."

Earlier in 2016, Twitter and Vine had said Vine was staying. In July, Twitter told The Washington Post that Vine was "an important part of our strategy," Business Insider reported. Hannah Donovan, Vine's general manager, had told Variety in June that "Vine will always be Vine."

Twitter's and Vine's posts and filings on the shutdown don't name rivals, departing creators or monetization as a reason.

What reporting showed

Newton's account for The Verge drew on interviews with seven former executives. "Instagram video was the beginning of the end," one told him, and Vine "didn't move fast enough to differentiate."

Newton wrote that Instagram courted celebrities with longer videos. "Marketers began shifting their money away from Vine, and stars followed." Snapchat, in his telling, became the "casual mass-market lifecasting app" that Vine's founders had once pitched to Twitter.

Vine never offered marketers paid placement like Twitter's promoted tweets, Newton reported, "in part because the founders resisted monetization from the start, sources said." It also never took a cut of stars' brand deals.

Its leadership kept changing. Hofmann and Kroll left in 2014, Yusupov was laid off in 2015, and Jason Toff, who ran Vine from 2014, quit in 2016, according to Newton. He wrote that the churn "likely contributed to Vine's failure to make money." Ankur Thakkar, Vine's head of editorial until May 2016, told him, "Vine didn't ship anything of consequence for a year."

Variety said the "lack of monetization options" led some of Vine's most prolific creators to leave. Ian Fogg, an analyst at IHS Markit, told the BBC that "Vine didn't keep pace with the innovation from Snapchat, Facebook and other players in the market."

TechCrunch's Josh Constine wrote that Twitter "struggled with user and revenue growth" and decided "to cut costs by ceasing to curate or host Vine videos."

What later analysis found

Five years on, NBC News said Vine folded "after the large-scale departure of advertising money and content creators."

Benedict Townsend interviewed Vine's founders for a podcast series for Global, according to the Royal Television Society's review of July 2025. The review said the series made clear that the 2015 creators' meeting was "just one cause" of Vine's death, alongside "a confused leadership, unsupportive owners and burgeoning competition."

The stage it reached

Vine reached the decline stage, where usage falls because people have moved to a substitute.

It grew first, topping the US App Store's free chart within three months of launch. By its own count, it had more than 200 million monthly viewers by August 2015.

Then usage fell. Research firm 7Park Data said 3.64 percent of Android users opened Vine in August 2014, against 0.66 percent by October 2016, The Verge reported. Video makers "fled Vine for its competitors," TechCrunch reported.

On the product life cycle, I count that as a decline, not a failure to launch. Like Google's Orkut, Vine was then closed by a parent putting its money elsewhere.

The lesson

I think Vine's lesson is about supply. "We're the ones driving the views," one of its top creators told Mic, and when their offer was rejected, they took their work to YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.

Vine said it was exploring ways for creators to make money in June 2016, months after most of those stars had cut back.

If a few people make what everyone else on your product comes for, ask them what would make them leave, and price it before a rival does. Vine's stars asked out loud in 2015, when most of them had already begun shifting their effort to other platforms.