This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s spring editorial intern Henry Ryeder. Find him on Instagram at @henryryeder. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
The 2010’s. A decade of… oh God I really do hate squeezing in human history into these stupidly arbitrary little categories of ten, but let’s list all the cliches. The 2010’s saw an economic rebound from the Great Recession that was wildly unevenly distributed. Wealth soared for the wealthiest Americans as blue collar jobs continued to falter under increasing globalization and automation. Politically, this resulted in the election of Donald Trump, one of the most pivotal, harrowing, and quixotic episodes in American history. Yet no political disruption, growing disasters from the Climate Crisis, or social movement seemed to stop the almighty Tech Boom.
That decade saw investment pouring into the ballooning tech sector. Advancements in Deep Learning artificial intelligence, internet access, and end-user hardware instigated the most financially lucrative moment for the technology sector since the Dot Com Bubble of the early 2000’s.
Lucrative is a strong word. Despite record investments from venture capital, many of Wall Street’s tech golden boys in this period were far from profitable, if they posted revenue at all. As mentioned in my previous article on streaming, the calculus for this is the invaluable user data that many of these tech startups are theoretically able to mine from those who use their technologies. In 2012, one of these unlikely, unprofitable shining stars reigned supreme: Twitter.
Founded in 2007 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s capitalization on a simple 140-character text social media quickly became one of the most widely used social networks in the world. Whereas Facebook was designed on the premise of recreating social circles (“like getting punched” by a Finals Club, as Jesse Eisenberg put it in The Social Network), Twitter was a shout into the void, visible to everyone (if you so chose) and thus an attractive way for customers to interact with brands and vice versa.
It was in the shadow of tech’s leading boy wonder that three men decided to corner the market on an untapped revenue stream: video. Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll met while working at Jetsetter, a luxury travel site that was eventually purchased by TripAdvisor. During their tenure at Jetsetter, the three men saw the potential for a short-form video content application. Youtube was entering its first true zenith period of independent creators. Yet with byte-sized content all the rage in text on Twitter, it was only natural that the same demand would exist among video. After all, social networks such as Facebook and Instagram already exhibited the demand for photo-sharing, why wouldn’t a video sharing platform also be as popular?
This was 2012. The world was supposed to end that year, remember? If not no worries, but why the hell are you reading The Zillennial Zine? Anyway, that year proved to be a pivotal moment for several reasons. Milquetoast flip-flopper Mitt Romney was handily defeated by incumbent Barack Obama, an event that rang the death knell of the GOP’s Country Club atmosphere that had dominated the party for the previous half century. Kony 2012 marked the beginning of seductive activist misinformation that paved the way for generations of Q Anon diehards. And Vine, a video-sharing platform, would prove to be so much more.
Early on in the company’s development, Twitter saw potential. Ian Padgham, a member of Twitter’s marketing team, noticed the creativity that the applications 6-second-video cap spurred. “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations,” Orson Welles famously maybe said, and this principle was certainly true of Vine. Twitter purchased Vine in 2012 for $30,000,000. A hefty fee for young startup executives in their 20’s, that valuation would have fatal implications for both the company, and one of its employees.
Vine was released in May of 2013. By June, it was the top-downloaded free app on the App Stores for iOS and Android. This period saw over 400% user growth that saw a wild creative revolution in short-form video content. The 6-second loops were both simple and disposable; a user could just as easily create one, enjoy one, or scroll to the next one. On Vine, a generation’s short attention span was reflected like Narcissus looking in the water. Within a year, Vine would be minting stars with impressive staying power and reach far beyond the app itself. These included Shawn Mendes, Jake and Logan Paul, and Lele Pons.
So why did the Vine app fail? Nearly as soon as the platform gained credibility, the cracks in Vine’s abilities began to appear. A relatively small (and quite easily undervalued) asset of Twitter, Vine had to ask for the muscle to grow. And it needed to grow. Only weeks after Vine’s release, Instagram introduced its own 15-second video capabilities. Vine, working with the limitations of a small startup and assumed user broadband access at the time, hadn’t made videos longer than 6 seconds available in its initial stages.
In efforts to keep up with the market, Twitter allowed Vine’s most popular users to post 140 second-long videos beginning in 2014. Still, Snapchat was closing in on Vine’s market share for short-form video content, and the troubles weren’t just happening outside the New York office. For its entire run, Vine struggled to turn its user base into value. Hesitant to monetize something so immediately “cool,” Vine sat on its popularity until the window for translation toward assets closed.
Problems were occurring within management as well. Yusupov and Hoffman had grown increasingly frustrated with Twitter’s unwillingness to supply Vine with the infrastructural capabilities required to compete in the market. Rumors were swirling about co-founder Colin Kroll’s “bad behavior” toward women as well as his poor management styles. Guess what got him fired from Twitter? I’ll give you a hint, it didn’t have to do with the danger Kroll might have posed to his staff.
By 2015, Vine might have been past its dizzying peak of 200 million active users, but it still had immense cultural cache. Twitter’s bankbook didn’t care. Vine’s failure to effectively monetize had caused an 80% drop in users and totaled a loss of $103 million for Twitter. It shuttered Vine in 2016.
Yet the story of Yusupov and Kroll continued. In 2017, they founded HQ Trivia, a similar viral sensation that burned bright and died young. This would mean literal death for Kroll, whose tempestuous working relationship with Yusupov led to Yusupov’s temporary ousting from HQ in 2018. Soon after, Kroll was found dead after a drug overdose in his New York home.
The story of Vine is one of American success, tragedy, and the whirlpool of financial investment and ruin that marked the tech boom of the 2010’s. Ironically enough, HQ Trivia officially folded in February of 2020, just weeks the COVID-19 Pandemic would spell the end of the optimism that the 2010’s tech bubble seemed to embody. Yet like all things tech-related, Vine’s success lies in its cultural and social influence. While Vine wasn’t able to capitalize on its popularity, TikTok has taken that void with full steam. Vine lost the battle, but in its accidental transformation of social media, it helped our relationship with the internet.
So, why did the Vine app fail? Do you miss that app? Let us know in the comments below!
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