Or Amanda Cerny, whose physical comedy earned more than 2.2 billion views. There was Zach King, whose eye-popping magic tricks earned him 4 million followers and more than 1.4 billion views. An ecosystem of young stars sprung up around the service, which evolved into a kind of live-action cartoon network. In 2013, Vine began allowing users to record clips with their phones’ front-facing cameras, and usage exploded. “It used to be the worst app ever, but you couldn’t get distracted by the bells and whistles.” “It’s kind of like drawing in Microsoft Paint,” he said. He loved the 6-second limit, which forced him to think differently about storytelling. Padgham’s first Vine was a simple time-lapse video of the view from his window at Twitter. (His early film about working at Twitter is likely one of the most-watched recruiting videos ever made.) After Twitter bought Vine, he sat in on meetings with the marketing team and began to explore its potential as a creative tool. As a member of Twitter’s marketing team in 2012, he was responsible for making videos that explained how the service worked. Ian Padgham saw the potential in Vine - both creative and monetary - before almost anyone. The app generated more beloved memes and cultural moments than most apps with twice as many users - but Twitter’s mounting core business problems this year all but ensured it would eventually be sold off or shuttered. While Vine once boasted a commanding lead over other social video apps, it failed to keep pace as competitors added features - something that ultimately drove its biggest stars away. Working a continent apart from their parent company, Vine’s small, New York-based team struggled to grow its user base or find ways to make money. Interviews with seven former executives reveal a portrait of a company whose cultural impact far outstripped its strategic benefits to Twitter. And while existing Vines will remain on the web, a media format that had become beloved for its versatility now appears headed the way of Betamax. With its own future increasingly uncertain, Twitter said it would shut down Vine’s mobile app some time in the next few months. On Thursday, the experimentation came to an end.
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“Watching the community and the tool push on each other was exciting and unreal, and almost immediately it became clear that Vine’s culture was going to shift towards creativity and experimentation.” “It immediately became clear that Vine’s culture was going to shift towards creativity.” “It became pretty clear as soon after we launched,” Hofmann said. Instead it became something wilder - and much more culturally interesting. Within weeks, it appeared that Vine probably would never become the everyday video sharing tool its founders had envisioned. “Our original beta had something like 10 or 15 people on it, and even with that small group we started to see experimentation pretty early on.” “It was surprising,” said Dom Hofmann, who founded Vine with Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll four months before Twitter bought it.
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Something about that loop - the way a Vine endlessly rewound itself after completing, like a GIF with audio - encouraged people to put the app to strange uses. It was part of their pitch to Twitter, which bought the company for a reported $30 million in October 2012, seeing it as a near-perfect video analog to its flagship app’s short-form text posts.Īnd yet even before the app launched, users had taken the 6-second constraint as a creative challenge. Its founders had envisioned their tool for making 6-second clips as a way to help people capture casual moments in their lives and share them with friends. The thing about Vine becoming the internet’s premier tool for making short-form videos is that it happened almost completely by accident.