RIP Vine: June 2012 to October 2016
Yesterday, Twitter, announced that they would be discontinuing the Vine mobile app. In a press release via Medium, Twitter assured users that the website would be available forevermore for people to view Vines, and that the app was not going anywhere immediately. Twitter did not announce why they were shutting it down, but some hypotheses have been floating around.
One proposed reason for Vine’s demise is a decline in content and usage. People have been leaving the service at a rapid pace and if they don’t leave, they simply aren’t posting.
“Our data shows that more than half (52%) of the platform’s top users (those with 15,000 followers or more) have left the platform as of January 1, 2016. There are 9,725 users on Vine that have more than 15,000 followers, putting them in the 99th percentile, and 5,094 of them have not posted on the platform since the beginning of this year” according to a study from Markely.
Reasons for this decline range from Instagram’s inclusion of video into the platform, which effectively stole Vine’s social market, and then Snapchat’s rise took its market of celebrities offering quick glimpses into their lives. These two apps effectively replaced most of the good things that Vine has to offer.
Some mourn the loss, while others say that mobile apps come and go. My question for the people is, “What’s next?”
