Social media. The one thing running our modern world. Anything can be influenced by social media. News, business, communication, advertisement, even bullying, can be done through social media. It has become something essential to our society, something people rely on for their jobs. In 2012, one of the most popular social media sites, Twitter, decided to purchase a brand new short videoing app called Vine. The site was made so people would be able to record short, 6 second videos of their everyday lives, and attempt to make the videos entertaining. Vine exploded over the net in 2014, but has recently decided to shut down. There have been many questions as to why Twitter decided to kill Vine. The site seemed to be running quite successfully, but for some reason, Twitter did not think so.
According to Casey Newton with The Verge, the founders of Vine did not intend for the site to blow up as it did, and were pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Twitter bought Vine from the founders for around $30 million dollars in October of 2012. Twitter also found the outcome very surprising. They did not expect Vine to become the enormous trend that it did. People found a challenge in making very short videos still entertaining. Vine’s peak happened in 2014, when stars began exploring the site. Soon everyone was using the social media whenever they could. People competed for the amount of followers and views they had on each of their videos. Some clips had as many as 4 billion views. It was when the well-known people, such as famous stars, began using the site that it really began to become popular.
Twitter was very pleased with the upcoming popularity of Vine. They were doing extremely well for how simple the app was. They had daily advertisements, and an entire group of people specifically assigned the task of managing Vine. But the managing crew did not have any future ideas or features for the app, and it began to seem quite simple compared to other popular social media, such as Instagram and Snapchat, whose sites were evolving rapidly. Eventually, the site began to lose its popularity to its competitors. The managers of Vine began leaving, practically giving up hope for the app. These managers have said that once the celebrities of Vine began posting less and less, everyone else stopped using Vine. Social media depends very strongly on the celebrities using it, because their followers then also stop using it. Twitter discovered that commercials were no longer present on Vine, so they were no longer making very much money with the app. It was decided that keeping the app was pointless, and that it was time for everyone to kiss Vine goodbye.