Vine.
Twitter · Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, Colin Kroll · Social Media
The six-second video app that shaped a decade of internet culture and never found a business.
—
Figures undisclosed
4 yrs
2013–2017
Acquired & Killed
Folded under a parent, roadmap dropped
Culturally enormous. Commercially empty.
TLDR
Vine's constraint — six seconds, looping — produced a genuinely new comedic grammar and a first generation of creators who built audiences in the millions.
Twitter acquired it before launch and never built the monetisation, creator payouts, or product velocity that competitors did. When Instagram and Snapchat shipped video, Vine's biggest creators left for platforms that paid them. Twitter announced the shutdown in October 2016 amid cost-cutting, and the app closed in January 2017.
Vine is the reference case for cultural relevance without revenue: an audience is not the same asset as a business.
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