This is a subject that has been weighing heavily on my mind for the past several days. Many people know of the popular app Vine, which allows its users to create 6 second videos on an infinite loop. Such a simple and fairly new concept, but yet it gained a lot of following and support. The app has 50 million downloads on Google Play (as of 10/30/2016), and many people have made a lot of money using the app. People who make vines are called ‘viners’, and they get paid hefty sums to promote products or brands in their vines. Needless to say, this app has a huge following, and many people look to it as a good source of entertainment.
That’s all about to end, though. Last Thursday, Vine announced that it would be shutting down the app in the coming months for financial reasons. This is understandable, though; the owners of the app, Twitter, already were struggling to make a profit as it is, and Vine was seen as losing revenue as it struggled to compete with more popular apps like instagram or Snapchat. They made it clear, however, that the website itself would stay up, all of the existing vines would be completely safe, and we would have the opportunity to download all of our vines.
Nevertheless, this is still really, really sad news for many. Vine was an innovative new app for people that wanted quick entertainment; the content quality of Youtube but the ease and accessibility of Twitter. Many viral videos and memes spawned from that site, things like Damn Daniel, What Are Those, and Deez Nuts would have never gained fame if it weren’t for vine. Even some popular celebrities, such as KingBach or Nash Grier got their start from Vine. We have that short and sweet video app to thank for a lot of things.
The news of the Vine shutdown hit me hard personally, too. I have a Vine account of my own, and I loved posting videos of random things I liked to do, the vacations I’ve went on, and the occasional edit. When I heard the news that the app was closing, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t believe it. I looked around at a bunch of different sources and they all confirmed the same thing. I almost cried, really. It literally felt like I lost a good friend that I never got to know as well as I’d hoped. That’s because Vine never lost it’s appeal to me. It’s not like MySpace where it slowly faded away from popularity and it would be best for them to just cut their losses. Vine still had so much to offer to so many people, and that’s what’s sad about it. To top it all off, it appears that Vine has already cut off their video uploading, and I never got the chance to make a final goodbye vine, and I thought I’d have more time than this.
Anyways, I think this is a very un-calculated decision that Twitter has made. So many people have loved Vine since the beginning, and I’m sure people are gonna fight to get it back. So far, the only company to make an offer to buy the site was Pornhub, and they’re almost certainly joking. Besides, the inventor of vine himself called for Twitter not to sell out the app. So I guess our only hope is that Twitter will work out some sort of deal, or that in a few months or years they will try to make a comeback. Either way, and as much as I hate to say it, it looks like we’re gonna have to say goodbye for now. Thank you, Vine; I really hope to see you again some day.
