Will Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition herald the return of Vine?
Twitter bought Vine in 2013 before killing the App in 2016. Musk has talked about a return for the short-form social media app.
It feels like Elon Musk has owned Twitter for six seconds but it seems he is already planning big changes to the social media site, as well as the products he inadvertedly acquired at the same time.
“Bring back Vine?” tweeted Musk on Sunday night, with just over 69% backing its return in a poll of more nearly five million people.
Bring back Vine?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022
Axios reported the same day that engineers have been assigned to pick apart the old code for Vine and adapt it for the modern market. A source told Axios, “it needs a lot of work.”
What was Vine?
Founded in 2012 by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll, Vine offered users the ability to post six-second-long video clips. It quickly became a market leader and had 200 million active users by December 2015. Twitter bought the app in 2013.
Every once in a while, someone sends me a link to a TikTok and I think about the person at Twitter who decided to kill Vine.
— Eva (@evacide) October 28, 2022
Coinciding with cutting 9 percent of its global staff, Twitter closed the app in October 2016. At the time no reason was given, though it was later attributed to the lack of monetisation available to the content creators. Many had already begun to flee to YouTube, Vine’s only real competitor at the time.
Why would Elon Musk want to bring Vine back?
Since Vines’ closing, a number of apps have risen to take its spot. First and foremost of these is TikTok. The Chinese-owned company began to take steps into the American market back in 2018 before exploding in popularity in 2020 during the covid-19 pandemic.
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The short-form nature of Vine has been relentlessly copied by apps like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, proving the concept itself is not flawed.
This video gets 17M views on TikTok. Front page of Reddit. And 200 views on Twitter 🤔. Bring back Vine. pic.twitter.com/nQm94cn7QM
— Peter (@PeteHeacock) October 31, 2022
The return of Vine could potentially provide some competition to TikTok. However, big changes would be needed to ensure Vine is not closed again, as well as having the necessary investment to prise users away from Tik Tok.