Will the Vine Shutdown Impact Marketers?

Just six months after its release in the iTunes app store, the six second video app, Vine, became the number one downloaded app with over 200 million active users. Now, just three years later, Twitter, who purchased the app back in 2012, has decided to shutdown the video app.

What Happened to Vine

Vine was founded in June 2012 and quickly took the online world by storm. Twitter, who saw potential in plugging Vine’s video platform into their own micro-blogging platform, acquired Vine just four months after that.

Fast forward to present day, Twitter has been struggling to maintain its popularity in the world of social media due to increased competition from Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. To try and increase their revenue, Twitter has decided to cut 9% of its
workforce. The majority of this 9% comes from their Vine division.

Although Twitter did not give a specific reasoning as to why they decided to shutdown Vine, the numbers can easily tell the story. In recent months Vine has seen a rapid decline in users. They have dropped to #284 in the top app charts, down from the
low 100’s in the beginning of the year. Vine has also seen a 55% decline in downloads year-over-year in both Apple Store and Google Play.

Vine (Sort Of) Lives On (For Now)

Even though Twitter will be shutting down the stand-alone Vine app, the website will still be available. Twitter stated in a blog post, “Nothing is happening to the app, website, or your Vines today. We value you, your Vines and are going to do this the
right way. You’ll be able to access and download your Vines. We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that have been made.”

Twitter will most likely be integrating Vine’s video technology sharing directly into their main app as way to generate more traffic and ad revenue for Twitter.

What Does This Mean To Marketers

Vine’s revenue was less than $5,000 a month according to company reports. Since there were no ads on the platform, the shutdown of the app will not negatively impact advertisers at all. In fact, if Vine does drive more traffic to Twitter, the increase
in ad inventory could make advertising on Twitter more inexpensive.

Twitter’s Future

As of this writing, the future for Twitter is a little bleak as their stock is down 25% this year.

What matters most for Twitter is their active user count. eMarketer is reporting that while Twitter will see a relatively small growth in users over the next few years, their overall share of the US social media market is dropping. What this means is
that Twitter has a strong core audience, but it will fail to attract the younger generation of the online community. These individuals are flocking to the Snapchats and Instagrams of the world, ultimately limiting Twitter’s growth.

Sources:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/27/twitter-is-shutting-down-vine/
http://adage.com/article/digital/twitter-s-approach-vine-periscope-ads/298530/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/27/twitter-vine-video-sharing-mobile-app-shut-down-costs
https://sensortower.com/ios/us/vine-labs-inc/app/vine/592447445/

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