The treasure trove that brought us "suh dude" and "why you always lying", has come to an end. After 3 years of six second memories, Vine is shutting down due to lack of funding, a decision made by its parent company Twitter. One of the biggest contributing factors to it's demise is the premise behind it.
If you were lucky enough to create a work of genius worth catching of the attention of the average human, then Vine acted as your six seconds of fame in the limelight. Vine, although catchy and addictive, was merely a launch point, using its parent company Twitter to further enhance it's star videos with re tweets which could be shared and spread to other avenues such as Instagram and Vine. The problem was, Vine was just that. A starting point for stars to catch and audience and then use that audience to gain success on broader platforms, platforms which PAID.
In order to earn a decent paycheck from using social media, it's essential to have a decent following. And by decent, these social media platforms mean millions. Vine stars with one million dollars can expect a paycheck of around $20,000-$50,000 per ad campaign based of information given by Niche, an agency who's primary function is to connect social media stars to willing companies looking to promote their products. The amount of followers a star has can greatly affect their ending paycheck from ad companies: one million followers could mean up to $5,000 more.
Now compare that to working on a larger platform such as YouTube. Internet sensation PewDiePie genrates $7.5 million in revenue from his YouTube channel alone per year as reported by Fusion. Now this all doesn't go directly to Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg. YouTube claims 45% of ad revenues from its users in order to sustain the website as a business. After taxes as well as operating costs, PewDiePie takes away approximately $4 million annually.
Now obviously not everyone can be massive Internet phenomenons, as much as we all would like. a more modest follower base, such as one million followers can still rake in a good amount of revenue, but not as proportional as the heavy hitters of the video world. For one million views on a video, a YouTuber could expect $2,000. But gaining and retaining these million viewers isn't as easy as posting a video once every week. The demand of creating engaging and creative content while balancing a work life as well, at least when beginning a YouTube channel, is often the demise of people creating YouTube channels for the fame and payment. Most if not all of the top YouTubers in their respective fields are passionate about their work and about their channel. They have integrated their lives into these channels which is why the passion for their work has translated to million of views per video.
Now although Vine is taking it's last breaths financially, news of it's closure has only sparked its interest and creative content submissions. Twitter users are commemorating the influential app through retweeting their favorite Vines, often using #ripvine. In terms of the app, Vine will still continue to exist for the sole fact of being able to save and cherish the Vines that have defined our culture and society over these past three years. Once the app has been closed down users will no longer be able to upload new content.
Another haunting prospect is the potential for Twitter to fall under financial crisis as well if the financial situation is not addressed now. If subsidiary companies like Vine are being shut down than that only gives a glimpse into the financial need of the bigger parent company. A world that is tweet-less, is a world most of us would hate to ever see. If that nightmare did ever come to fruition, it would not be surprising for other social media sites and apps, such as facebook, Instagram as well as SnapChat to incorporate Twitter like features into their everyday use.
