Benedict Townsend
Appearances
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Of course, eventually they did extend the core length of Vines from six seconds to the incredibly obvious 140 seconds.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Sorry, can we just drill down on the fact that they changed the iconic six seconds to 140 seconds purely because a tweet has 140 characters. 2.3333 minutes. Perfect. Oh, nailed it. The most bizarre arbitrary decision in the history of decisions.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
We spent five weeks studying exactly what a second is.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
How can you fix the platform if removing this group will kill the platform?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Another big change Rich's design team was in the process of launching was a recommended feed.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Despite the many complaints you'll see online about heavily curated feeds these days, the fact is that a well-seasoned algorithm will always deliver a better user experience than just a raw conveyor belt of content. Hell, TikTok achieved rapid cultural dominance almost entirely thanks to its revolutionary algorithm that can learn users' likes and interests in record time.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
You have to give people what they want, but also remember that people don't really know what they want. not until you bring it to them. And Rich says there was actually a fairly positive response to the design changes they were making. But within the bigger machine that was Twitter, Team Vine felt like a side act.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
When was the first moment that you got a sense that things were maybe on a bit of a downswing?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
So how big was this Vine team at the time you joined on that top floor?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
They have all the views, but mainly because they've got these revine-for-revine systems... You've got great strategy. You know, these are very successful people in their own right. I don't want to put them down too much, but they have strategized their way to the top.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
In the course of researching this story, one theme keeps surfacing. Various people told us about a tense, uneasy dynamic that existed between Twitter and Vine. It's an odd one because Twitter spotted Vine's star power early, investing big, betting hard on its success. The partnership had all the shine of a red carpet romance, dazzling from the outside.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
But despite the fanfare, behind the scenes, the chemistry just wasn't there. When did you first become aware that there was this sort of odd relationship between Twitter and Vine?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Periscope, which you'll be forgiven for forgetting, was a live video streaming app. When Vine started falling out of favor, it became Twitter's new golden child. You know, it's a shame because there was a brief, wonderful period where you could post Vines on Twitter and they would play natively in the feed.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Vines would be interspersed with tweets in your timeline in a slick way that was honestly very ahead of its time and much more reminiscent of the state of social media these days. It almost made too much sense. Twitter integrating one very popular product with another so that everyone could enjoy mummy and daddy playing nice with each other.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Anyway, very quickly Twitter changed the rules so Vines would only post to Twitter as links and would only play when you left the app. It's yet another inflection point. If Twitter had kept Vine properly integrated, would Vine not have lived a little longer? Found it easier to maintain cultural relevance?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Do you think it's almost a case of Vine not taking advantage of its relationship with Twitter rather than Twitter spurning Vine? Or do you think it was a sort of mutually frosty relationship?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
According to Karen, this tense dynamic had roots all the way back to day one.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Karen instantly recognized something that had been long overlooked at Vine HQ. Just because content from top creators was characteristically immature, that didn't mean they shouldn't be taken seriously.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Were you surprised that they allowed you to sort of just do your own thing and not be messed with?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Do you think in hindsight, maybe if Vine had been more directly integrated from the beginning, things might have gone smoothly in the long run? No. Why not?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Well, that's the weird thing. You might think, oh, everyone's jumping ship to Instagram. It must be so much better. They must have cracked the code. But they hadn't. Instagram video was clunky. It was limited. To be honest, it kind of still is. Plus, like Vine at that time, there wasn't really any proper monetization.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Well, there's a couple of reasons. I mean, the first one is just, I think, plain frustration. Like Vine wasn't evolving. It wasn't iterating. In our present day, look at TikTok. TikTok's got a new feature every 15 minutes. TikTok is always evolving. Vine was always the same. And when nothing changes, you know, people just get bored. They just look elsewhere.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And then the second reason, I think, is just simplicity. The average user doesn't want multiple apps. If you say to them, hey, you can have one app that kind of just does everything, you know, in your busy day, that's quite a nice promise to users. And that's what Instagram was really trying to do. They were like, why leave Instagram and go and watch video elsewhere?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
You can just do it all in Instagram.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Absolutely. But when you are a giant platform like Instagram, you can, shall we say, lovingly take some of that simplicity and that originality from someone else and make it your own. I mean, people forget now, but Stories was a signature Snapchat feature. That was Snapchat's thing was that you could post a story. Instagram nicked that. And now we basically only associate Stories with Instagram.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Now, that doesn't kill Snapchat because often the borrowed thing is not quite as good as the original. But you're going to siphon off enough users that it's meaningful to do that.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Karen was still convinced that if content creators were nurtured, and the kind of content people actually wanted to see was prioritized, that she could turn things around. And it would be a new era of Vine, both faithful to its original legacy, while also having the courage to stay relevant, perhaps even revolutionary.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
It would be an approach that embraced creators instead of shunning them and emphasized Vine first and foremost as a creative tool, as a way to get leverage over Instagram and Snapchat, which were much more focused on being social sites. It was much more about your friends, your family. Vine was all in on content creation.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And in that sense, you can't help but think of TikTok, which very much took up that baton a few short years later. To this day, I wouldn't really say that TikTok is a social media site, or that it really pretends to be. It's first and foremost a place for creation and creators. That's what Vine needed to be if it had any hope of surviving. Everything was riding on the rescue plan.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
The party, an act of defiant positivity. A glittering Hollywood soiree, an olive branch disguised as champagne and canapes. Glasses of fizz, a hubbub of excited chatter, all the buzzing excitement of an LA industry party. The very same kind of industry intrigue that creators had been dying for.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
This is a Global Player original podcast. Last time on Vine, six seconds that changed the world. It's code red. To protect morale, the digital board displaying daily user stats that's up in Vine HQ had quietly been taken down. Vine is spiraling.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Symbolically, King Batch's party was a celebratory moment heralding a new era of harmony between Vine and its creators. A white flag, a treaty signed, a change of guard, the bugle call of a new dispensation.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
There it is. There it is. Oh boy. This is what we've been building to. The ominous invitation is to a meeting that'll take place just off Hollywood Boulevard at 1600 Vine, the heart of the influencer kingdom.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Next episode, a meeting and a million dollar demand.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Could Vine's birthplace also become its burial ground? Would the very creators who built it be the ones to end it?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Bruised and battered, the little app that could was on its last legs. But blow after blow, it was still staggering forward. And against all odds, there were still those fighting for its survival. It wasn't over. Not yet. Stick around, because the real twist is still to come.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
You can listen to the last two episodes of Vine's Six Seconds That Changed the World when they drop next Wednesday, May the 7th. You can listen to Vine's 6 Seconds That Changed the World on Global Player. Download it from the App Store or go to globalplayer.com.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Vine's 6 Seconds That Changed the World is a Global Original podcast, created and hosted by me, Benedict Townsend, and produced by my co-creator, Mary Goodheart. Narrative and creative by producer Kevya Cardoso, score and sound design by Patrick Lee, and mix by Chris James.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Sophie Snelling is the executive producer, Al Riddell is head of factual podcasts, and Vicky Etchells is director of podcasts at Global. This is a Global Player original podcast.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
While viners were taking their work very seriously, the app itself seemed, by contrast, to be basically just a bit of a mess.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Of course, none of this is helped by Instagram's rival push into video, all three of the app's founders leaving in quick succession, growing discontent from Vine's top creators, a general disregard of the app by its own parent company, Twitter, who has, by the way, just undergone a brutal series of layoffs. But aside from all that, yeah, things are going great. Why do you ask?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
So Karen set to work trying to change things, unfortunately carrying the weighty baggage of years of neglect and dissatisfaction.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Karen was confident that Vine's long-term survival depended on nurturing creators, especially the up-and-coming talent being crowded out by the Mafia group. So her strategy behind the scenes was to split Vine creators into three tiers, starting with those top dogs.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
It was a race against the clock. And Karen went a step further in her efforts to repair relations between Vine HQ and the Viners. She brought a creator on board to join her team.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Chris Melberger. We met him last episode. He had nearly a million and a half followers. He was known for bizarre comedy skits and, importantly, his connection to the 1600 Viners. These days, he's a Twitch streamer, but back then, Karen described him as her mole in the community.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Let's discuss this dilemma, right? Because the 1600 Viners are now completely dominating the platform. And is that necessarily a problem? Because they're attracting huge numbers of viewers, huge numbers of loops, as they said on Vine. And on the surface, at least, you would go, OK, well, happy Vine users equals happy Vine, right? But not really, right?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
So that must have been weird for you to go from being a Vine creator to being in the belly of the beast.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
And crucially, there were strategies to find new ways to promote creators who were previously being crowded out by Revine for Revine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
One of the creators who benefited from the new creator team's efforts was Kenny Knox. He was part of Karen's Ivy League tier.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
So what kind of stuff was she doing in the Vine days to sort of help you out?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Of course, the major sticking point was still monetization. Karen couldn't pay creators directly through Vine, but she found ways around it.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Brendan McNerney is another former Viner who's a big fan of Karen. He describes her as, quote, the fairy godmother of Vine and says that her arrival signaled a clear moment of change in the app's relationship with its creators.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
It's so refreshing to hear someone be positive at this point in the story. I feel like we've had so much doom and gloom, especially from creators. I'm getting whiplash here hearing someone say, a Vine employee has made me happy. It feels like this strategy from Karen seems to be going well, at least from the creator's point of view, right? Perhaps this could be a bit of an upswing for Vine?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Certainly Vine understood that this beast needed to evolve to keep up with the times. It's just that some of the ideas they had to do that seemed incredibly strange. Of course, it wasn't just Karen's new creative department that was making radical changes to try and turn the app's fortune around.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Vine's iconically stripped-back interface, its revolutionary design choices, they've been groundbreaking back in 2013 when it launched. They gave Vine such a massive head start on mobile video, but in just two short years, it had become a very crowded space, and those features were no longer so original. In fact, they've been replicated and often improved upon.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
By this point, we had video on Instagram and on Facebook and an insurgent new app called Snapchat. It'll never last. And a whole new style of ultra-quick posts called Stories. And on top of all of this, YouTube, the original online video giant, was courting creators like crazy, dangling its healthy ad-based monetization in front of them like a golden-crusted carrot.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
Vine had to innovate or it was going to get left behind. And Rich Arnold was leading the major design overhauls. The first, and it actually feels painful to say this, was losing the six second limit.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
They were kind of load bearing, weren't they? It was like, we don't like this incredibly popular section of the app. It's like when a doctor's like, we have to leave the bullet in or it will do more damage.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
The idea of extending the time limit was something that had already been discussed before. Creators were frequently complaining that their scope for innovation was limited by videos being so short. And perhaps more importantly for some, it also limited monetization opportunities. It's tricky to fit adverts into six seconds.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
But Rich says there was a deep suspicion at Vine around the idea of making clips substantially longer.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Now, remember Rich from episode one, the New Jersey designer who'd been super excited when Vine first launched? Well, as luck would have it, by 2015, he'd banked himself a job at Vine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Rich started out as a regular designer and was later promoted to head of design. And you don't need to know much about tech to know that that is a positive upgrade.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
On that fateful day. And we've got good news. Enter Karen Spencer, the missing piece of our puzzle, the key to unlocking the mystery of who really killed Vi. We'll hear from her right after this. And we're back. And Mary has big news.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Like, the Viners love her, and I can see why. She really lived up to the sunny reputation. Now, obviously, me and you are chomping at the bit to ask her about the meeting at Vine Street, and we kind of thought that would be the meat of the conversation. Wasn't even ready for all the stuff she was about to unpack about the situation she walked into at Vine. Once again, thank you for your time.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Because we started with this climactic meeting that everyone's heard of and everyone has a take of, but no one seems to have been at. We cannot get any information from people inside the room. Every creator we've tried to talk to who is inside the room, we haven't been able to get hold of. Complete silence. But apparently you have a lead.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
I bet, Nick, by the way, usually when I talk to tech people, they're in some very industrial corner office. You're in the jungles of Costa Rica right now.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
With a background so lush and green, it genuinely looks AI-generated. Karen in the Costa Rican jungle, a wide-brimmed hat over pigtails.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
I'm incredibly jealous. That is great. Up to now, the Vine staffers I've spoken to have had backgrounds in the worlds of tech and app design. Karen's a bit different. Before joining Vine HQ, she was already at home in creative spaces and in Hollywood.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
It seems like Karen, along with Ashton, was way ahead of her time when it came to recognizing the winds of change that had come to her industry, courtesy of social media.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
It's kind of mad now to think that this would have been so mind-blowing, but in 2009, it was seismic. Karen was determined to blaze the trail of this new kind of media. She started work at an influencer agency called The Audience, which she says was the first ever...
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
So first of all, you know, before you joined Vine, you were obviously very early on in that kind of influencer space. Do you remember the launch of Vine? Was that news at all for you? Did you think anything of it?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
But how was the traditional media old guard responding?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
When an opportunity to work directly with Vine came up, it seemed like a clear match.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Yes, this name Karen has come up quite a few times.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
It's a miracle they hired anyone with that system. Yeah. That's crazy. In August 2015, Karen officially joined Vine HQ. And it wasn't just Karen who was new. The role she was taking, head of creative development, was also brand new. So were you the first person to have that role?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Yeah, it seems at that time Twitter basically had a hard line on how it dealt with creators, which is to say to not deal with them at all.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Absolutely not. You know, the approach of social media platforms traditionally, to this day, has always been actively courting creators all the time. YouTube was constantly crowing about, like, we have so much money we can offer you from ads. Like, please come and create. Because they understood that this is a symbiotic relationship. You need the platform. You need the creators.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
You need to get along. You know, you can't take the creators for granted. Absolutely.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
absolutely you can take an approach of like oh well there'll always be more creators but also sometimes it's a bit of a quality over quantity thing like you know you've got a movie you could cast Tom Hanks and you go you know what there's plenty of other actors we'll just get another actor and it's like yeah but that is not Tom Hanks, doesn't have the pull. It's the same with these creators.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
You know, I think Twitter seemed to have this approach of like, creators are just like a naturally occurring resource that comes out the ground. We'll have so many of them and it'll be fine. But it's like, well, actually, if you want to succeed, you have to court the big players and you have to treat them with a modicum of respect. You have to acknowledge they exist.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
And where did that come from, that kind of resistance? Is it because they wanted it to be about...
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
When I think of this period of Vine, I think of comedy skits. I think of the 1600 Viners, a spattering of generally offensive lowbrow humor. Turns out there was so much else going on, it just wasn't breaking through for users like me.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Especially because those are two worlds that seem to be in almost constant tension.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Taylor Lorenz watched this play out. She says it wasn't just a matter of refusing to engage with the biggest creators. The founders were actively taking measures to try and suppress their influence.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
So she was in the room. She was in the room. And she led that meeting.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
And as far as I know, and we've read extensively about this, I don't think anyone else anywhere else has had a proper first-hand account of that meeting.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
That is crazy to me. Yeah, this was one of the revelations from your book. A revelation to me anyway, which is that I always associated Vine with having like no algorithm, you know, no, they didn't mess with the feed. You know, it was kind of one of the last apps where they weren't actively messing with the feed.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
But as you say in your book, apparently they were basically secretly curating the popular feed by a certain point, basically because they didn't like creators. Exactly.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
So if we could get her, it would be huge.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Russ, expectedly, frames it a little differently.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
This is a Global Player original podcast. On our last episode, we learned of Sweet Baby Vine's bittersweet graduation into the mainstream as content copycats and competition crowded the platform. Taylor Lorenz, a celebrated tech journalist well-known for her coverage of Vine, summarizes it all pretty well.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Of course, we know that by now for the 1600 Viners, this was about more than just having their popularity recognized. Vine was an integral part of their careers and their livelihoods. Brendan McNerney remembers when monetization opportunities became a core part of the Vine experience without any involvement from the platform itself.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Other creators we've spoken to have said this as well. They said it felt weird to them that they couldn't communicate easily with the people running the app that they were so successful on.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Of course, effectively icing out a whole category of your most successful users has other side effects.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
you know release our paycheck here or something you know via views what those creators might not have appreciated at the time was that while they were asking the mighty empire for a paycheck the mighty empire apart from barely having two pennies to scrape together also had its attention elsewhere because vine's phenomenal growth had slowed and slowed karen had only been in her role for three weeks when she was explicitly told that the company was in major trouble
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Running a pottery workshop. Ah, that does imply a person who probably left tech behind. Uh-huh. And might not want to talk about Vine anymore.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Vine is in code red. Creators are mad. Leadership is scrambling. And Twitter is treating Vine like an unpaid intern.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
And yet, as the chaos mounted, Vine had one last Hail Mary to play. Karen had a rescue plan that came in an unlikely disguise. A party. An invitation that promised to fix everything or blow it all apart.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
You say that, but then you sent me a video that has given us a little glimmer of hope. It's a video. It's an Instagram story or something of her walking through the jungle over a rope bridge. And she's wearing a bag. What does that bag say, Mary?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
With more red flags than a Logan Paul apology video, this is the freakout before the storm. You can listen to Vine 6 Seconds That Changed the World on Global Player. Download it from the App Store or go to globalplayer.com. Vine 6 Seconds That Changed the World is a global original podcast created and hosted by me, Benedict Townsend, and produced by my co-creator, Mary Goodheart.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Narrative and creative by producer Kevia Cardoso, score and sound design by Patrick Lee, and mix by Chris James. Sophie Snelling is the executive producer, Al Riddell is head of factual podcasts, and Vicky Etchells is director of podcasts at Global. This is a Global Player original podcast.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
I think we can get her. I choose to believe. While the search for Karen continues, let's get back to Hollywood, where rentals do not come cheap. By strengthening their own share of the Vine space, the 1600 Viners opened a wormhole, inevitably weakening the platform.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
As competition intensified, creators had to seize every opportunity to monetize their followings, to sustain their income streams, moving beyond the basics of standard brand deals. It wasn't easy. But like the folks selling shovels during the gold rush, if you were smart, there was money to be made. You just had to know how. Take Magcon, for example. Oh, how to explain Magcon.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
You know, I'll let vine expert Taylor Lorenz have a go.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Another famous IRL meetup featured Nash Greer, the most followed creator at the time with 5 million followers, and Jerome Jarre, who had a measly 4 million followers, visiting Iceland, the country, not the British supermarket. They let their followers know they were going to be at a shopping mall at a certain time. Here's how that went. Yeah, they got completely mobbed. Absolute chaos.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Screaming, crowd crush. The mall ended up having to be shut down for safety fears. In fact, the authorities had to burn down the mall and salt the earth so another mall could never bloom there again. Okay, I made up that last part, but it was pretty crazy.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Yeah, for those who don't know, what exactly are they? I think the number one question most people would have is, what are they doing on stage? And I don't think anyone ever knew.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
With all the fame and the fanfare, the 1600 Vine has closed ranks. Getting access to people who witnessed life at 1600 Vine has not been easy. We reached out to seemingly everyone who has ever lived there. None of them would speak to us. But there were some people who had a little peek behind the curtain, and we found one.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Well, that was my second guess. With 700,000 followers, Brendan McNerney fell solidly within Vine's classification of a mid-level creator. That's what counted as mid-level. He wouldn't sell out any tours, but he was consistently producing popularity.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
content and as a creator he was flexible his material later veered towards the absurd he was more interested in pushing boundaries than maintaining popularity but he was always well connected on the creator grapevine and he spent a good deal of time with the 1600 viners of all the people i spoke to he has the best insights i've been able to find into what working with that group was actually like
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
could be brand friendly but at the same time i think at the end of the day they were still trying to push the envelope in some way which i think is respectable it's interesting that you said that they would like full-on delete vines because of course you know it's not monetized right you're just okay yeah there's brand deals out there but ultimately when you post a vine you're kind of doing it for the love of the game right you know especially in the early days so the fact that they were dedicated enough to just fully delete videos
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
I don't know. I think that might surprise people.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
CPM basically means how much money brands would be willing to pay a creator to promote their product. It literally means cost per meal, the value per thousand impressions on each bit of content you make. It's basically just a way to measure how valuable someone's content is.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
And here's the thing, Vine wasn't paying any creators directly, but quantifying the value of their performance on the platform was definitely translating into money-making opportunities outside of the app. These finance bro acronyms, they feel a far cry from the early days of Vine. The rebel app that was all about making video editing accessible, a creative challenge, a tool built for creativity.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
But it was fitting for an era where Vine was going through quite a dramatic metamorphosis. On the 7th of January 2014, just under a year after Vine's official launch, one of its original founders, Dom Hoffman, walked away. It's pretty shocking. Vine had been his brainchild, dreamed up with Russ Yusupov, sold to Twitter, and grown into a rapid cultural phenomenon, and he was leaving it all behind.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Colin Kroll, founder number three, initially took over Dom's role as lead general manager, but just three months later, he also followed Dom out the door, and as the dust settled, only Russ stayed on.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
This is all leading up to that confrontation that we all know is coming, right on their home turf. The 1600 Viners had figured out how to dominate the platform, game the system, and now their influence is exploding, along with their sense of entitlement.
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5. Do It For The Vine
I mean, these were also, you know, especially you had a long-standing relationship with Dom. You know, these were friends of yours. How did it feel for you, especially when you were the last founder standing?
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5. Do It For The Vine
Did it make you question whether or not you should stick around? Obviously, you left to do HQ Trivia, but when they left each time, did you think, is it time for me to go as well?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Former Vine staff have told us that Vine's work culture had suffered at Twitter HQ, and Colin later made a statement to Axios confirming that he had been, quote, let go from Vine for poor management, saying he was sorry for the things he'd said and done, which made people feel unappreciated or uncomfortable.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
There are allegations of yelling, bullying, and even, quote, creepy behavior towards female employees that were leveled against the founder, claims he denied. But for the others, I imagine that running a product inevitably wasn't quite as exciting as inventing and launching one. Surely a monotony sets in when you transition from potential to reality. But not according to Russ.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
But Russ, too, ended up saying an early goodbye to Vine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
In October 2015, it was announced he would leave his role as creative director as part of a restructure at Twitter, which saw over 300 Twitter employees lose their jobs. This was done ostensibly to speed up internal work at Twitter, where its structures and hierarchies had become crowded and messy.
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5. Do It For The Vine
It was likely also due to the fact that Twitter, much like Vine, had real trouble making money, with its net income in 2015 being a cool minus $521 million. We only know this now, but in fact, Twitter actually wouldn't make any positive net income until 2018 and 2019, before losing it again in 2020 and, at the time of recording, never getting it back. To you or I, this may seem slightly insane.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Mary, you can taste the foreshadowing. You've got this group of people who live on Vine Street, who have worked out how to completely dominate the app, have this incredible sense of entitlement, and now they're mad.
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5. Do It For The Vine
If I was operating at a $500 million annual loss, I'd probably make a few changes, you know, maybe buy fewer coffees and avocados. But tech giants like these are used to tying value to social and cultural dominance. It's just that every so often the small fact that they don't make any money and in fact lose enormous amounts of money can kind of rear its ugly head. But we'll get back to that later.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Of course, not every tech company was facing the same struggle. I mean, in the first quarter of 2015, Facebook made $500 million because Facebook, unlike Vine or Twitter, had worked out a way to get ads in front of eyes in a way that actually made money. That's also why Instagram, Facebook's own adopted child, was allowed to roam even more freely than Vine was.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
But none of this, of course, would be Russ's concern for much longer.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
continue working on vine that other idea that russ was exploring turned into a phenomenon that was known as hq trivia remember that i used to play that every day i really did russ founded it along with colin kroll and it grew to 2.5 million players at its peak but that's for another podcast With the founders all gone, Vine needed a new team.
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That's Brandon Calvillo, the subway worker from Orange County that we met last time, whose Vine comedy skits were popular page mainstays.
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I believe that Vine is up in the echelon of perfect technological moments along with maybe the first summer of Pokemon Go. And it's really been downhill from there for a short form video after it went away. I miss it all the time.
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Praise from Ryan Broderick is praise indeed. He's one of those tech reporters who are so deeply immersed in the online world, he could probably give you a definitive ranking of every pixel on Google's homepage. In 2013, he was fully tuned in as Vine became a household name.
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She cashed in. When J-Lo, the Kardashians, Maybelline, the White House, even NASA jumped on the trend, she was able to turn brand deals into life-changing income. And this isn't uncommon, but it's a cautionary tale. Remember Hoctour? Hoctour! How could you forget Hoctour? The US trademark database has over 30 applications for it, including one by the woman who actually said it. Not demure.
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Around middle 2013, 2014, you started to see... like 27 vines, you've got to watch, you know, it was, it was that era, this massive influx of digital publishers, just, you know, writing up any viral moment and then sending it out to Facebook. Right.
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And that era was, you know, it's very silly to look back on now, but I think it was very useful for identifying when something had kind of broken through the zeitgeist, when a content type could become something that your parents could read on Facebook.
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Vine started out as this kind of punk, rogue, creative machine, punching way above its weight. With a relatively small pool of creators, no rules, and almost no algorithm, for Ryan, it was a kind of magic.
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So I think it was changed eventually, but at first you couldn't upload video into Vine. You had to film the video with Vine. So there was this implied spontaneity, this sort of implied magic where it's like, wow, I captured this six-second clip and it's crazy. I mean, a lot of it was like very typical for the era of viral video stuff. So it was just like funny moments.
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It was people doing pranks or extreme behavior in public. It wasn't something you edited. It was just something you filmed. And a lot of the ones that went viral had like a very specific feel to them, which was like, oh, I managed to capture this like six seconds of incredible video content.
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That magical, ephemeral quality that's since been dubbed Vine energy. With more users than ever before and a place securely in the mainstream, Vine content hit its second wave. The evolution came in part alongside subtle design and interface changes, like the introduction of an upload function.
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Now videos no longer had to be captured directly in the app, but could be created externally and then loaded in. This opened up a whole new world of creativity, don't get me wrong, but it also traded off a lot of the spontaneity that had made the app a success in the first place.
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then once you could start to upload videos to vine the nature of what was going viral there changed a little bit it became a little more high concept and that's when you get like the real we now say like oh this tiktok has vine energy that's what we're talking about people who are doing sort of absurd skits weird art projects that are like really funny but in a really short way and it'll cut like right at the right moment i have
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a million examples of this sort of thing. Describing them out loud always sounds like describing a dream. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. But there's one really good series that I loved, which was this guy, he's outside of his apartment. There's a woman up at the window on the second floor and he's like, toss me my keys. And then she throws a printer.
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And this messy business of viral ownership started on Vine. I'm Benedict Townsend, host of Scroll Deep, a show that's chronically online so you don't have to be. And this is Vine. Six seconds that changed the world. The biography of the little app that could and then didn't.
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And the printer just smashes on the ground next to him. And he's like, I said my keys.
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Why the fuck would I say printer? And like, that's the whole video. And that's sort of what I would describe as like maybe the, the, the secondary wave of vine humor. which was sort of happening in tandem with the more organized influencers. And I think you could almost view it as sort of a reaction to it, which we kind of see on other video platforms.
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As one half of the video platform gets really standardized, the other half gets really chaotic.
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We're seeing that with TikTok right now. It all felt like a party. And what party is complete without a multinational corporation? We also started to see brands on Vine.
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which is kind of your dead giveaway that your social network has blown up. So we started to see really bad, weird advertisements being made as Vines, which I remember just thinking were insane looking, but they tried.
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The brand deals on Vine were weird and ineffective, but they were the first step towards refining the online ad ecosystem that dominates the world today. The same ecosystem that saw a platform like Meta make $69 billion in digital advertising in 2023 alone.
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It was a really innocent time when you think about it because no one really knew what to do once you had gone viral on Vine. And I think that's the other sort of tell that Vine had broken through is that we were getting genuine Vine celebrities or Vine viral stars. And there was this real question mark of what does that mean? What do you do now? Because it's only six seconds.
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So it's like being famous for a gif. It's not really a lot of room to build on.
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When brands realized that successful creators could be their most direct access point to customers, it didn't just change what it meant to be a Vine creator. It changed the entire social media landscape. Here's Brandon again.
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For Aaron, still working at the bookies, William Hill, because you're wondering, in Dover, the arrival of brands on Vine changed his life forever.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
4. Not Demure
Of all of Vine's features, the app's greatest triumph, the democratization of content, the thing that allowed anyone to rise to the top spot, that's what made it a cultural force. While the origins of the most iconic Vines may be lost, forgotten to the sands of time, they still live on.
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4. Not Demure
Was there a bit of a gear shift for you after that of like, oh, this could be something?
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Finally, popularity was turning into real opportunity. But that also meant real competition. To get advertising deals or appearances, you had to stay on top. There was enormous pressure for creators to prove their worth to brands by churning out content that kept the fans happy and engagement high.
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Maybe it was inevitable then that soon there were accusations of cheating from smaller creators who were increasingly finding that their own jokes and sketches were being replicated without credit.
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Chris Melberger was a mid-level creator who actually ended up working for Vine HQ. More on that in the next episode. And he was best known for having great links in the Vine creator community. Like so many others, he saw jokes or even whole skits getting repeated by different users.
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Today, TikTok's riffing on Vine energy and YouTube compilations of TikToks that taste like Vines are still bringing the greatest hits to a new generation. But the same thing Vine was celebrated for, that allowed people to go from complete obscurity to genuine stardom, may also have been the app's biggest blind spot.
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The Big 1600 that Chris is referring to were a group of around 20 of Vine's biggest stars who had all moved into the same apartment complex around 2015 in order to create videos together. The complex was on Vine Street. And if that sounds familiar, good job. You're keeping up with the series. If it doesn't sound familiar, then I don't know why you started on episode four, but good luck to you.
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Andrew Batchelor, known as King Batch, he was the first to move into 1600 Vine. And then others like Amanda Cerny, Lily Pons, and Logan Paul soon followed. At one point, Justin Bieber was even hanging out there.
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You're not likely to know the name Brandon Moore, but you've very likely heard his iconic video.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
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By this time, Brandon Calvillo was also a big player himself. And by virtue of living in California, he was right in the heart of Vineland.
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In 2015, Brandon, who went by the creator name Busco, posted a video of a police officer in the act of arresting one of his friends. The officer looks up at the camera, and we're all expecting some kind of protest against the arrest to follow, but no. With a quick pan down, he zooms into the officer's clumpy black work shoes and exclaims, We're one of those!
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You know, to each their own. I'm a bit stuck on this. I'm just obsessed with the Vine Street house because I just think it's so funny. Do you know anything of what the process was to get to live in the house?
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This is a Global Player Original Podcast. You know those addictive videos that follow a marble as it sets off an elaborate chain reaction? Well, this extended metaphor is about as hard to pull off as one of those. Stay with me now. If YouTube was the first domino that set the marble off, Vine was the perfectly timed slingshot propelling it forward. And Instagram?
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4. Not Demure
You mentioned the kind of mutual benefit. Smaller creators maybe were throwing out allegations that the big dogs were maybe gaming the system a little bit. But obviously there was a bit of a rewind for rewind. You know, there were certain people who could absolutely dominate the popular page. Do you think that was unfair?
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4. Not Demure
Let's take a moment to explain Revine for Revine here. Just get it sorted because it's going to keep coming up again and again. It's very simple. I feel like most people would be familiar with the idea of just sharing content or, for example, retweeting a tweet.
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Basically, when you revine a video, you take someone else's video and you put it in front of the eyeballs of the people who follow you, right? And so very quickly, people realized they could game this because if I've got a million followers and you, Mary, have got a million followers, if we keep revining each other's videos, we're effectively putting it in front of two million people, right?
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4. Not Demure
Supposing we've got different followers. Exactly.
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4. Not Demure
But there will definitely be some people who don't follow whatever. And so we're able to, one, just get way more eyeballs on our videos. And two, there's a little popular page, which is judged purely on how many views you're getting. And if you're, I'm not going to say scamming, but if you are cleverly getting lots and lots of views. I think you just said it. Don't want to hear me say that.
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If you're getting lots and lots of views, you're going to shoot up that popular page.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
4. Not Demure
Yeah, because you're up against sort of a cartel of people with millions of followers. Exactly. Who are pushing those videos to everyone.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
4. Not Demure
These days, of course, on TikTok and stuff like that, the very clever modern algorithms solve this problem. Because instead of just getting a raw feed of videos, they're slightly curating what you see so people can't dominate. But back then, Vine is basically uncurated. So you're just getting a nonstop shop.
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of Logan Paul, etc. Then, of course, you have the additional twist, which is you have this popular page. That is the one thing that's sort of curated on Vine, which just tracks the most viewed videos. But again, if you and your mates, who all have millions of followers, are trading revines, you're going to just juice yourself to the top of that popular page and be there all the time.
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Here's Ryan again. The top Vine stars moved into one apartment building together on Vine Street in LA and basically created like a video views cartel where they would all just appear in each other's videos and remain in the top 10 videos on the app.
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It felt like the feature had a detrimental effect on how creators were working and what they were posting. Manon Matthews, you remember her? She was the stand-up who tried Vine for a laugh. Well, at this point, she had millions of followers, but she still found herself dwarfed in sheer numbers by the very biggest creators, whose follower counts could be almost 10 times that.
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For Manon, it felt like the feature had a detrimental effect on how creators were working and what they were posting.
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Kenny Knox takes a slightly more forgiving view.
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Bridget Todd is the creator and host of iHeartRadio's tech podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. Based out of Washington, D.C., she's also a former Vine addict.
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It was fair game. You're paying homage. IB, by the way, stands for Idea By or Inspired By, and it's a little polite hat tip to acknowledge an original creator. Honestly, that's often all creators are looking for, just a little bit of acknowledgement. It's a pretty low bar, but failing to reach that bar would not end well for you, especially on Vine.
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For Brandon, the attitude turned from resentment to a sense of, well, if you can't beat them, join them.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
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Pandora's box was open, and chaos, not the fun, spontaneous kind, but the slightly more scary kind, now reigned. The vine you knew, the scrappy underdog of creativity, that was gone, replaced by a ruthless, cutthroat ecosystem where survival meant playing the game. And for those who refused, well, the game played them.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
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And as creators fought to outshine each other, their frustrations started to shift to a much bigger opponent— Vine itself. Vine is probably the best job and the worst job I'll ever have. But hey, it wasn't all bad. Unless you were a founder of Vine, because things were about to get really messy.
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Next time, the Vine mafia tightens its grip. Creators turn against the empire and, plot twist, the empire starts eating itself. Oh, and the app's leadership? Let's just say their six seconds at the top was running out. and fast.
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I hope you're still with us, because this marble hasn't even hit the bucket yet. You can listen to Vine's 6 Seconds That Changed the World on Global Player. Download it from the App Store or go to globalplayer.com. Vine's 6 Seconds That Changed the World is a Global Original podcast, created and hosted by me, Benedict Townsend, and produced by my co-creator, Mary Goodheart.
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Narrative and creative by producer Kevya Cardoso, score and sound design by Patrick Lee, and mix by Chris James. Sophie Snelling is the executive producer, Al Riddell is head of factual podcasts, and Vicky Etchells is director of podcasts at Global. This is a Global Player original podcast.
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I would bet that even if you've heard the phrase on fleek before, this might well be the first time you've heard Peach's name. Real name Kayla Newman, Peach's Monroe went mega viral in 2014 after she posted a Vine admiring her perfectly plucked eyebrows, coining the phrase on fleek. The term, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as extremely good or very attractive in style, became a sensation.
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When Ariana Grande picked it up, it reached new levels, and brands jumped on the bandwagon, keen to show that they too were hip and cool. The same thing happened to Bosco, a.k.a. Brandon, of What Are Those?
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He actually posted the original video on Instagram, who by then had made their own rival push into short video, but it was quickly shared by another user to Vine, and from there it went stratospheric.
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The magnetized pulley lifting it higher. Then the marble perfectly landing in the bucket? That's TikTok. My point is, in the digital world, everything is connected and timing is everything. Every day, 34 million videos are posted on TikTok, so if you have a great idea that misses its off-ramp, tough luck, buddy.
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Tens of millions of loops on that first video and millions more on imitation posts as other users rushed to do their own take. The problem? Brandon himself had been behind the camera when he made the video. Yes, the line was his, but he appears completely anonymous in the final product. And the account that shared it on Vine belonged to someone else.
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So while the audience adored his creation, he hardly received any credit for it. Then in 2018, Marvel cemented the memes place in pop culture history by including it in a little known indie movie by the name of Black Panther.
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Okay, Mary, you might think that that was a great compliment to Brandon as the memes creator, but that's not how it felt to him, was it?
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I get it, though, because at first you're like, okay, yeah, I made this cool thing. That's fun. And especially in this time, it's like, how do you even monetize these things? Is there an expectation of that? As he said, I've gifted the world this thing. But then it gets to a certain point where it feels like, oh, seemingly everyone is benefiting from this thing.
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And in fact, people are profiting from this thing, except me, the person who made it. That would make you feel sick.
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I mean, is it too much to ask that your name be relatively as known as the incredibly famous thing you create? Yeah. Is that too much to ask?
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It's like when you say a joke too quiet and someone else in the group repeats it louder. But the person repeating it louder is the Walt Disney Corporation. Yeah.
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Today's algorithms worship newness, meaning trends have the same lifespan as a housefly, and songs, sounds, and challenges become nauseating as quickly as they become catchy.
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You met Jasmeet, aka Jasrain, in our last episode. To him, it's really no surprise that the mainstream is hungry to take on the language of minorities.
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Kenny Knox grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and was in high school when he discovered Vine, about a year after the app launched. He instantly felt at home.
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Kenny quickly found his stride and grew quite an impressive following. In fact, he was actually the very last person to win the coveted Viner of the Year Award.
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Until it wasn't. The viral catchphrase made cashier-turned-content-creator Jules Lebrun an overnight sensation. Her TikTok following skyrocketed into the millions, earning her appearances on morning shows, late-night TV, but just two weeks after she started trending, two strangers had already submitted trademark applications for her phrase. Now, don't worry. Jules fought back. She won.
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What Bridget's saying feels instinctively true. When I ask people to recall favorites off the top of their head, there are certain vines that always come first. The god-tier vines. One-hit wonders that capture a moment of magic, seemingly by pure chance, launched into the ether by creators who, in a puff of smoke, disappear back into normal life, never to be seen again. I love you, bitch.
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I ain't gonna never stop loving you, bitch. Steady your pitchforks, white viners. Viners? I'm not saying that the God tier is entirely made up of minority creators. I mean, there was the ginger kid blocking out the haters with plastic spoons.
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But if we're being real here, it feels like a disproportionate number of history's favourite vines came from minorities, and especially African-American creators.
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Today's creators are much more aware of taking ownership of their content. Even if memes and catchphrases are a nightmare to trademark, the public cares that creators get their due. For example, the guy who tried to trademark Jules Lebrun's catchphrase, very demure, very mindful, before she could, he had his address publicly listed on Google Maps. Don't do that, by the way.
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We're not encouraging that on this show. We're in a different era now, but back in the life of Vine, we're still in 2013, and no one really knows how to protect their content, let alone how to make money off this thing. But that was all about to change.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Remember, social media in 2012 wasn't the moving feast of crisp, high-definition videos we have on our phones today. It was pretty much all photos, which, you know, if you're 3G held out, took a couple of seconds to actually come into focus. Videos, well, those were for desktop when you had decent Wi-Fi. And so the first seed of Vine began to sprout.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
At what point did you make the decision to go, oh, this seems like a nice idea to, we should try and make this. Maybe this could be something.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Dom and Russ needed one final piece to their puzzle, a programmer who could actually build an engine capable of powering the vehicle. That's where Colin, the third founder, comes in.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
And did you feel that there was an element of risk in sort of putting your eggs in that basket or were you pretty certain about Vine?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
In June 2012, the company was officially founded. They were going for it. But nothing gets made without some cash. And that takes finding funders. Luckily, they had a head start.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
With the VC relationship already solidified, Russ and the team were able to push ahead without the usual monetary headaches of other startups.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
The beta, if you don't know, is an early form of a product that you can kind of test and try out. You see, they never pitched Vine. They just let people play with it. And the results spoke for themselves. Checks were being signed before the six seconds had even elapsed.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
You might have noticed that Russ doesn't exactly get excited about much or seemingly anything. He's a classic inventor, more concerned with product than with popularity. And the product, the product was good. Like really, really good. The biggest names in tech were coming knocking. The stakes had never been higher and investors urged caution.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
They advised Russ and the team to let the experts handle the negotiations. But they didn't listen. Enter Big Daddy Twitter, the tech giant with deep pockets, global ambitions, and a deal that, for better or worse, would change everything.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Is this like, you know, in this era of tech, are you thinking we should wear suits or is it like we've got to go tech casual? I'm just trying to picture what that room is like, you know?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
But you were like, this is the big leagues. We better break out the button down. Exactly. My friend, Twitter did not only invest, they bought the whole bloody thing. Was there ever any other offers from other companies?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
On the 9th of October 2012, Twitter acquired Vine for $30 million. The two sailed off into the sunset and everything went smoothly. Well, not exactly, but we'll get to that. Let's stick with Russ and the gang for now. Well, I mean, you sound quite cool about it now, but I mean, as you say, you were guys in your 20s. You've got one of the biggest companies in the world throwing money at you.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
There must have been a bit of champagne popping or chest bumping or something going on.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
More exciting for the team was preparing Vine to launch to the global public. It had come a long way since that initial spark of an idea from Russ and Dom, but even in its early form, the app had features and design no one had ever really seen before. Stuff that would change the face of the internet forever.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Yeah, definitely the first to popularize it, which is kind of crazy when you think of the ripple effect onto the world today.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Definitely. I mean, yeah, it's one of those inventions that once you have it, you can't imagine life without it. But I mean, how many articles are written every day about how autoplay video is breaking our brains?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
But I guess it's a Pandora's box thing, right? Like, if they didn't invent it, maybe someone else would have. I don't know how much blame you can lay at their feet. Could they have really known back then what they were unleashing? Yeah. I'm always hung up that they popularised looping video.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Because looping video, now it's synonymous with TikTok, but, you know, in 2013, that was basically witchcraft. You want to watch a video, you hit play, you watch it to the end, and it ends. But by removing a beginning and the end, you kind of stretch the concept of a video entirely into something else. It's not an obvious idea, necessarily.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
That's interesting because I've heard this mentioned that it's longer than six seconds, but I thought that it was longer than six to facilitate the loop, but actually it sort of, to trick the user in a positive way into making them think they've got enough time.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Remember that little tidbit for your next pub quiz? But enough shop talk. Let's jump back into the story. So Vine had money. They had the backer. And they had some very exciting features. But the team were barreling towards a launch without one crucial element. A name. It was Dom who first suggested Vine. Can you remember any of the rejected names?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
On the 23rd of January 2013, just three months after Twitter bought it out, Vine was in the greasy little palms of the public. This was make or break. I mean, what do you remember of launch day?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Yep, that's the same Jake Paul who boxed Mike Tyson last November in what was the most streamed sporting event in history. He reportedly earned over $40 million for that. Declaring your winner by unanimous decision, Jake Paul! The Paul brothers remain two of the biggest social media influencers in the world, and it was the frat house ecosystem they built on 1600 Vine Street that started it all.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
The engineering team's efforts paid off. Vine didn't crash. It was a dream come true for Russ. Because, I mean, you personally, you'd come from the former USSR, and now you're sort of, you've come to the US and, you know, basically conquered this massive US tech company. Does that feel like a sort of personal... hero's journey for you?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
From the imagination of its three founders, in no time at all, Vine was in the hands of the public, but never in their wildest dreams or worst nightmares could they have predicted the eruption brewing beneath their feet. How their little easy-to-record, easy-to-share video tool would disrupt celebrity, revolutionise entertainment, change the way we live online, and die all too soon.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
As any founder will tell you, it's not the creator that defines what an app does. It's the user. And on the horizon, Viners were amassing. It was all kind of merging into one big cartel kind of thing, if you know what I mean. It was brilliant. Vine was a new frontier, and some of its earliest creators were the first to crack the code of going viral.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
But what made some soar, while others faded into the scroll? In the next episode, the scrappy, weird Wild West days of early Vine and the pioneers who turned six seconds into a new kind of fame.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
You can listen to Vine's Six Seconds That Changed the World on Global Player. Download it from the App Store or go to globalplayer.com. Vine Six Seconds That Changed the World is a Global Original podcast, created and hosted by me, Benedict Townsend, and produced by my co-creator, Mary Goodheart.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Narrative and creative by producer Kevya Cardoso, score and sound design by Patrick Lee, and mix by Chris James. Sophie Snelling is the executive producer, Al Riddell is head of factual podcasts, and Vicky Etchells is director of podcasts at Global. This is a Global Player original podcast.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
It was one of the earliest and most successful content creator houses, shared living spaces where they could collaborate to create content that collectively built their brands. It catapulted the brothers and their buddies next door to global fame.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
This is a Global Player original podcast. It's a bright day in Los Angeles, California, in autumn 2015. And in a building just a stone's throw from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a meeting is about to change the course of history. It's taking place in the conference room of an apartment block where a group of online creators live and make videos together. The address? 1600 Vine Street.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Soon, that kid from that video, oh my god, it's that kid, they were getting guest spots on TV shows, signing major movie deals, they were inking brand partnerships to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. So you're worth all the money these companies pay you? To be honest, I'm worth three times the amount I'm getting paid.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
It was the dawn of a new kind of celebrity, and whether you loved them or hated them, at one point, you couldn't escape them. But I'm getting ahead of myself. On this fateful day in 2015, the 1600 Viners have arranged a meeting with representatives from Twitter, the social media giant that owns Vine. Their demand is simple. We want to be paid, and we want to be paid big.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
And if we aren't, well, we'll walk. Abandoning Vine en masse, taking our quite sizable followings with us, willingly decapitating the app's greatest source of popularity. You might be thinking, don't let the door hit you on the way out. But these guys are deadly serious. This meeting is the culmination of years of frustration.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Renumeration for everything they feel they've given to a platform that's long neglected them. How did it go? Well, hold your horses, folks. There's a whole episode about that. But let's just put it this way. When was the last time you opened Vine? Okay, so how in the bloody heavens did we get here?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
A bunch of teenage pranksters have Twitter, one of the world's biggest social media giants, with a multi-billion dollar market cap by the proverbial... I mean, can I say balls? Balls feels wrong. Imagine I'm saying a classier version of balls. They're not even past the legal drinking age, but they're holding Vine, an app invention that has revolutionized social media as we know it, for ransom...
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Well, dear listener, to understand how we got here, we have to go back to when and how it all started. The thing that made Vine interesting, that made the app so popular so quickly, wasn't just that it let you edit videos on your phone, but the creative challenge it posed to the public. You have six seconds, now make something good.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Freelance tech designer Rich Arnold also remembers the buzz when Vine landed.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
If you know American accents, you might be able to pick up on Rich's New Jersey twang. He'll play a bigger role later in our story, but at this point, he's just moved to the city to pursue his tech career, which back then wasn't exactly a thing on the East Coast. It was another way that Vine was already breaking the mould.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
The name is no coincidence. The 18 people in this room are Vine's biggest stars, the most popular faces of a platform that, though none of them realise it yet, is just months away from total collapse.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
What were the things about Vine that felt like cool and new and odd and interesting?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Taylor Lorenz is a celebrated tech journalist, well known for her coverage of Vine. So it seems fitting that she was one of the first to experience the six-second phenomenon.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
For one of the single most consequential online products in modern history, very little is actually known about Vine's origin story. We know it went big. We know it went bust. But where in the heavens did it actually come from? Well, the only way to figure it out is by finding a founder. But according to my producer, Mary... That's not as easy as it sounds. OK, Mary, three founders. Who are they?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
If you were anywhere online in the 2010s, you'd probably recognise the building, when its modern apartments overlooking public courtyards with views of Hollywood were the backdrop to the internet's most viral videos. And you definitely recognize a few of the people in the room. A tight-knit crew of attractive, barely 20-somethings, known for cross-posting videos of pranks and sketch comedy.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Okay, so Dom Hoffman. What's his vibe?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Couldn't quite believe his personal website. I think there's maybe 20 words total on the whole website. It doesn't feel like a man who's aching to be contacted. Yeah.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
obviously did not expect to get reply and then like six weeks later in my inbox hi yeah russ would maybe like to talk we now have an agreed time and place for an interview yes the time is 10 minutes from now yes the place is here exactly and he's i've had whatsapp communication with him this morning which has given me reason to believe that he is going to show up
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Okay, so all things being equal, we should be talking to Russ in about 10 minutes. Dear listener, if the next voice you hear is Russ, we did it. If it's not, well, you know, we tried.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Surprise! He turned up. Ross Yusupov, Vine founder in the flesh. Yeah, Ross. Excited to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here. Well, not in the flesh so much as sat in New York chatting with me over video, but there he is. Jet black hair, peppered with grey, black t-shirt, professional-looking microphone, a tasteful potted plant behind him. But he does quickly disable his video.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Like any good reporter, I kick things off with a hard hitter. Why six seconds?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Simplicity, the heart of any good idea. And Russ had a lot of those. You know, there's a lot of hype around tech founders, a lot of mythology. But before Vine was even a thing, Russ's portfolio of work was already intimidatingly impressive.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
For someone who would soon hit entrepreneurial megastardom, Russ's story probably doesn't start where you'd expect.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Until the age of five, Russ was a child of communism, growing up in the USSR, in what is now Tajikistan. In 1989, a couple of years before the Soviet Union collapsed, his family joined thousands of others in a huge migration wave out of the country. But his family didn't just leave the USSR, they moved to the very heart of capitalism itself, New York City.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Sure, most of us were uploading dumb homemade videos back then, but the 1600 Viners, spearheaded by two shaggy-haired brothers named Logan and Jake Paul, turned it into a business.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
But it wasn't Wall Street that captured young Russ's imagination.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
When it came time to find a job, design was a natural fit for Russ. And it's maybe not what you'd expect from a tech founder. In a world of Bill Gates characters building computers and writing code in their family garage, Russ's more artistic leanings stood out. But friends sought him out for design work for their tech startups, and he was in the right place at the right time.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
It was 2009, right in the middle of the financial crisis, but the tech industry was surviving and thriving. Along the way, Russ picked up an important lesson. To have the freedom to properly pursue your own ideas the way you wanted, you needed to be your own boss. You needed to be a founder.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Russ wanted creative control over his next project, but he needed partners. The first to join him was Dom Hoffman.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Russ and Dom seem to have one of those friendships where it just feels like your brains are in sync, excited by the same questions, fascinated in solving the same problems.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
Along with my producer Mary, I tracked down an elusive founder, tech journalists, popular creators, rivals, and perhaps most importantly, former Twitter staffers who were in the room when Vine drew its very last breath. But first, let me take you back to the very beginning. That's what the internet sounded like back in 2005. It was a simpler time on the World Wide Web. Network speeds were slower.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
No one had heard of an iPhone. We wrote blog posts, not tweets. And social media was still in its MySpace adolescence.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
The founder of YouTube had just uploaded its first ever video, 19 seconds of his friend in front of San Diego Zoo's elephant enclosure, entitled Me at the Zoo.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
Fast forward a decade, it's 2015. The internet was moving at warp speed, and at the heart of it all was a tiny, looping app called Vibe. It started with an idea so simple it was revolutionary.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
This is a Global Player original podcast.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
Before it had even made it onto the App Store, Twitter bought Vine for millions and launched it three months later.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
Six seconds. That's all it took to change the way the world tells stories. And for a while, it worked.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
But tech startups can plummet as quickly as they soar. And in the life of Vine, both success and failure came with startling speed.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
This is the strange story of the life and death of Vine, an app that changed the world in six seconds.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
It's 2025, and we are living in the content multiverse. Trends have a lifespan of days, if not hours. Nowness is the beat. But it was Vine that set that pace, starting an avalanche of content that would eventually bury it. So, who killed Vine?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
If it's not already obvious, I'm a die-hard Vine fan, and like many devotees, I've long been baffled by how something so popular, so foundational, so universally beloved, one, never even turned a profit, and two, folded entirely before its third birthday. For years, I've been uncovering the real story of what happened at Vine. What went on inside Twitter HQ?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
Did creators really hold the app for ransom? The very same app that had made them rich and famous in the first place? And why, for the love of Vine, is Elon Musk putting out polls on X with the three-word question, bring back Vine, all these years later? This is the story of the brief, sweet life of Vine. Join me, my dudes... This is where it gets interesting.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
My name is Benedict Townsend. I'm the host of Scroll Deep, a pretty popular internet comedy and commentary show. I've been chronically online since 2005, but for me, no app has come close to the lightning in a bottle that was Vine. And many have tried. To this day, TikTokers try to reproduce videos that they believe emanate that rare, elusive quality known only as Vine energy.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
1. Who Killed Vine?
In 2015, the app had over 200 million active users. Two years later, it was dead. Vine left behind a legacy as puzzling as it is profound. And a decade later, we still don't really know who pulled the trigger.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World - Coming soon - Subscribe now!
This is a Global Player Original Podcast. Do you remember Vine? In 2013, a humble video editing app launched that changed internet culture forever. Six-second videos, pure chaos, no time to overthink. And somehow, it worked. Vine birthed internet legends and villains, viral memes you still quote today, and laid the early foundations for our TikTok scroll spiral.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World - Coming soon - Subscribe now!
Then, just three years later, it was gone. No warning, no goodbyes, just a total shutdown. People say it was the money. Others say it was blackmail or sabotage. But after speaking to creators, insiders, even a Vine founder, it turns out the truth is far more complicated and far crazier than any of that. To be honest, the answer to who really got rid of Vine...
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World - Coming soon - Subscribe now!
It's probably going to make you a little mad. It's a wild ride into genius and betrayal. Profit over creativity and the real power of influence. I'm Benedict Townsend. This is Vine. Six seconds that change the world. A deep dive into how the best app on the internet lived fast and died weird. Launching the 23rd of April. Listen on Global Player or wherever you get your podcasts.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World - Coming soon - Subscribe now!
This is a Global Player original podcast.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
It still can't take you back to 2015. Do you know what I mean? Sadly.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Right, so they're kind of shifting what Vine... Vine servers aren't even cold before the post-mortem begins. One day later, an article was published, entitled Inside the Secret Meeting That Changed the Fate of Vine Forever.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
I'm on the computer and I'm having a fun time on Facebook.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Because, you know, no matter how bleak it gets out there, Mary, we will be back at it again one day. And maybe it'll be at Krispy Kreme.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
For Manon Matthews, though, Vine itself is part of the nostalgia, not just something that benefits from it.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Ryan argues that we'll never see an app quite like it again.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
There's something to be said about that, how Gen Z, even Gen Alpha, hold an obsession for Vine despite never being old enough to have actually used it. It proves that Vine's legacy isn't just propped up by nostalgia, that even under scrutiny from a whole new generation who never knew a nicer internet, Vine's content stands the test of time.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Funnily enough, those compilations are the primary way creators like Kenny Knox have even managed to earn any money at all from their Vine fame.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Whatever you make of Vine's influence on the internet, there's no denying the impact it had on the real lives of the people who used it. The creators who started careers paid off their debts and had paths open to them that they never even thought possible. It's just attached to so much positivity and so much free expression and free creativity.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
For months, the Vine Street showdown was known only to insiders and select creators, but details were suddenly being made public. Taylor's article set the online world alight, partly for its general juiciness, but also because it provided a tidy answer to the open question, who killed Vine? The pitchforks were out almost immediately.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
could i put it like it was a phenomenon literally it started everything for everyone perhaps vine's biggest fumble was ignoring those creatives especially the ones they look down upon they hoped they could just ignore logan paul until he went away but an unwritten law of the universe is that logan paul never goes away inadvertently it was the 1600 gang who changed the future of how business approaches creators bridget todd thinks they're more important than perhaps we'd like to admit
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
The story of Vine may not fit within six seconds, but it does loop. We used to dip our toe into the babbling brook of the internet, but Vine opened the floodgates that turned it into a raging river, where mere seconds of immersion can sweep you away for hours. And if you drown, well, at least someone's getting your ad money.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Maybe it's a little harsh to lay the blame on Vine for opening Pandora's box. I mean, the truth is, if they hadn't invented it, somebody else probably would have. TikTok took Vine's blueprint of short-form video and supercharged it with a personalized algorithm, some creator-focused strategy, and that all-important monetization.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
I came to this project as a former Vine addict, hoping to uncover the mystery of what happened to the app that gave us spaghetti drills and screaming goats. I thought it'd be a grand tale of rebellion, a creator uprising, or some epic war between artists and suits, but as always, the truth is messier. You posted the last ever Vine. Is that right? I mean, first of all, what an honor.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Nice, nice. I like that. That's crazy. The last of her vitamins. So, um, this is the part we play famous by Kanye West. It's the track that closed out Vine's final moments. Can we just get that loaded up? Sorry, but no, we don't have that kind of money. Ah, okay. Well, instead, picture this. A grainy VHS sunset. Kanye crooning, we're never gonna die.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
And the spirit of Vine ascending to the great cloud server in the sky. It's beautiful. It's poetic. And it's much cheaper for us to describe than to actually play it. And that's a wrap. This show has been a real labor of love, but it's also just been one giant excuse for me to talk about Vine like it's some great lost civilization of the internet.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
We may never get another Vine, but its legacy lives on. Every time you doom scroll, every time a TikTok earworm ruins your day, every time someone yells, what are those in the wild? There be the spirit of Vine. Seriously, though, I want to thank everyone who's helped bring this project to life.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
My producers, editors, and the truly unhinged world of Vine creators who opened up their lives and their DMs to us. It's been a ride. Stay weird. And I'll see you on the internet.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Karen is the first to admit that the 1600 group had power, that they were crucial to Vine's survival. But Taylor's version of history still irritated her.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
You can listen to Vine's 6 Seconds That Changed the World on Global Player. Download it from the App Store or go to globalplayer.com. Vine, Six Seconds That Changed the World, is a Global Original podcast, created and hosted by me, Benedict Townsend, and produced by my co-creator, Mary Goodheart.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Narrative and creative by producer Kevya Cardoso, score and sound design by Patrick Lee, and mix by Chris James. Sophie Snelling is the executive producer, Al Riddell is head of Factual Podcasts, and Vicky Etchells is director of podcasts at Global. This is a Global Player Original Podcast.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
This is a Global Player original podcast. The true story of Vine begins as soon as it ends. A legacy that will shape the internet for a decade and gift us the world we have today, although not really sure how good of a gift that is. Thanks, Vine. In our last episode, do you believe in life after Vine?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
From the point of view of Vine HQ, it was forces from above rather than below that had been crippling Vine's potential long before the meeting had ever taken place. The prevailing narrative? That a group of the biggest Viners brought down the app after a climactic multi-million dollar showdown was captivating and cinematic.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
It was one of the main things that drove me to start this project in the first place. But like most captivating cinematic stories... It's just not true. Vine died in October 2016, but as we've found over the course of our series, the app had been atrophying for nearly a year before that.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
In a way, it wasn't that Vine left behind legions of mourning fans, it's that legions of fans had already left Vine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
It's interesting that Taylor mentions Musical.ly, the lip-syncing app that would prove to be Vine's unlikely successor. When I asked Russ if there was anything Vine could have done to have survived, his reply really surprised me.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Oh, yes. Yes. For the listener, Kenny is showing me a beautiful glass trophy with a whale tail, like a dolphin tail at the top. Is that right? What is that?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Quite a few people in tech have really labored this point about the significance of lip-syncing, which, you know, at this point kind of feels like a bit of a blip in the history of the internet, but Musical.ly figured out how to do something that Vine had never managed to do, which is to get masses of users to actively post content on their own rather than sitting back as just passive observers.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
So there were conversations at Vine. They maybe didn't go very far, but there were conversations at Vine about should we bother with this lip syncing thing?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
This is my baby right here. Fun. That's a rare thing to have. That's very cool. Thank you. How did that feel? Did it feel bittersweet? Did you know at the time I'm probably going to be the last one?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
It's difficult to imagine any social platform these days ever choosing not to pursue a potentially popular feature because they thought it was too vapid or too uncreative. It's another example of the Vine team putting their own creative sensibilities ahead of profit-led decision-making. If Vine had gone all in on lip-syncing, would it have survived to this day?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Or, with the great wisdom of hindsight, did they kind of do themselves a favour by not clinging on? In a way, Russ's aversion to lip-syncing has been partly vindicated. No one considers that era of the internet as particularly iconic.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Just before I say goodbye to Russ, he drops a wild alternate history where Vine is bought back by its creator, the prodigal son returning into the fold.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
I don't think I've heard that before about you possibly trying to buy it. Can you very quickly run us through the tale of you trying to buy it back?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
And then, yeah, they discontinued it. On the 28th of October, 2016, for the first time in three years, the world woke up without any new Vines. With new uploads disabled, the app exists in a watch-only state.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
I think that brings us to the end. I'm just going to check. Mary, is there anything you want to jump in with?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
So was Vine dying in a quick and timely manner the best thing that ever happened to it? For Jasmeet Raina, it was a case of getting out while the going was good.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Is Jasmine right? If Vine had survived, would it have simply devolved into yet another social media site that users love to hate? Taylor Lorenz seems to think so.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Most friends I tell about this project usually respond with some version of, oh, I loved Vine, but was Vine good? Or did it simply never get the chance to turn bad?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
You know, it's funny, working on this project, I've come to realise that so much of the sort of misty-eyed nostalgia around Vine is less about the app itself and more about just this broad yearning for this bygone era of the internet. You know, it's not so much about missing Vine, it's just people wanting it to be 2015 online again.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
Yeah, and then you have this peek into this alternate reality where Russ buys Vine back. Do you think that would have been the salvation of everyone?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
You can't have Vine in a post-Vine world. That's very true. Wow. Thank you very much. Thank you. That's deeper than I expected. But yeah, it sort of, it self-cannibalizes, doesn't it? It's iterative. I mean, Elon Musk keeps talking about bringing Vine back. He is the owner of Twitter. He technically owns Vine as well. But like, what would new Vine be? I mean, if Vine had...
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
8. Famous
survived to this point it would basically just be tiktok which is vine but with algorithms and other stuff but with also this more modern sense of self-awareness and self-branding i think really when we talk about bringing vine back it's about bringing back a feeling and there will be something that does that but it probably won't be like a random video app it will be some new exciting thing that none of us can picture yet yeah
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
So much for that NDA. Once other creators started hearing about Vine potentially paying a million dollars for content, it became a free-for-all. Setting a precedent Twitter had hardline avoided for years. There was no way they'd agree to a payout now that the word had got out. If there had been a chance for a turnaround, there definitely wasn't one anymore.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
So, no deal. And true to their word, the 1,600 Viners headed straight for the door. But they weren't bluffing this time. They were gone. For Rich Arnold, head of design, it felt like Vine was finally reaping what they had sown.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
I think it would be easy at this point to be like, oh, boo-hoo, these rich 20-year-olds didn't get their million dollars or whatever. But everyone has a different perspective on it. But when you look in subsequent years, how much money platforms like YouTube or now TikTok are more than happy to pay creators.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Obviously, those are platforms that are much more successfully monetized with ads, which is one of Vine's various failings. Mr. Beast or any of these huge creators make a lot of money and platforms are willing to give them money because they value what they create. Is it that crazy what they were asking for?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
cannot emphasize enough how consequential this was in so many ways it would have been one thing if the 1600 vine negotiations had just quietly failed but word getting out that they'd happened in the first place arguably was even more detrimental the creative relationships that karen had been carefully nurturing for months were destroyed in a matter of days
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
These days, his vibe is a little different.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Most of the creators I've spoken to from around that time say that even if they respected the sheer savviness of the 1600 group in monopolizing the platform, their overwhelming presence was still damaging to the Vine-iverse and to Vine content overall. Here's Manon Matthews.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Now he posts about his wholesome family life on a farm in Nashville with his wife and kids. His riding of tractors. He has also diligently ignored every single attempt we have made to talk to him about this podcast. But the main thing you need to know is that at this point in our story, Marcus is the head of the 1600 group.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Jasmeet Raina, he's the creator we met back in episode four who found success, often from taking the piss out of popular Vine trends.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
And that deterioration was very real. Brandon Calvillo, one of Vine's very first creators, had built a serious following for his comedy skits long before cliques, collaborations, and re-Vine for re-Vine became the norm. He'd seen Vine through every era, and he remembers when it was clear that the end was nigh.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Whether or not he would identify as such, he's basically become a union leader, and he shouldn't be underestimated. He's got the vision and the charisma to unite Vine's biggest creators into a negotiating unit. And this has never been done before. Of course, that also meant that it was all new to Karen and her team. Walking into the meeting room, they had very little idea what to expect.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Kenny Knox, part of the newer generation of creators, was a big beneficiary of Karen's schemes. When did you first get a sense of like Vine's kind of on the way out?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Bit of an understatement. Karen was going to fight to the bitter end. Vine was still breathing, even after the failed meeting and the mass walkout. It wasn't dead yet. And if a spark of creativity had rapidly made it one of the most downloaded apps in the world when it started, why couldn't it happen again?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Back in New York, Karen cut her losses and was turbocharging the two remaining tiers, going full throttle on the new generation of creators who'd stuck by the app.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Interestingly, a lot of the Sprout creators that Karen and her team had identified as major talents are the same people who have gone on to be the most famous post-vine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
I watched it at the time, but I was watching it now and I was like, oh, it's Cody Code. Everyone's in this. It's crazy.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
March 2016. As the first buds of spring begin to emerge in Central Park, power is shifting at Vine HQ.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Rich Arnold recalls Team Vine being taken out for an away day with the new general manager.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
You're in this sort of conference room, right? That's within the Vine Street complex, as you said.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Yeah, that's wild. Do you remember exactly when you found out that they were shutting Vine down? Do you remember where you were, how you found out?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
And then that email you described is absolutely insane. I want to take a pause for a moment because, Mary, apparently you have got hold of this email.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Okay, this is genuinely my first time seeing this email. I'm going to read it out.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Okay, today's headline, team huddle tomorrow. Feels pretty light so far.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Hey, dudes. We're going to do a midweek huddle tomorrow at 11 a.m. It doesn't even say meeting. It's just huddle.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
If you're remote or OOO, which I guess is out of office, would be rad. Rad. That's the bit that gets me. It would be rad if you could VC in. And I'm guessing VC is video call or video chat. Video call, must be. Why? They couldn't type out out of office? Brackets. If you don't have access to Hangouts, hit me back. Hit me back. And I can dial you in because G-Hang is the best like that. Thanks.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
This is a Global Player original podcast. Last time on Vine's Six Seconds That Changed the World, Karen's jubilant rescue party ended on an ominous note.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Thanks with a full stop as well. Oh, yeah. Thanks.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
It's not, by the way, this is mandatory attendance because you need to find out we're letting you all go. If you're working remotely, it'd be rad if you could call in because if you don't call in, it'll be less rad for you because you won't find out that you have lost your job. It's very cash, isn't it?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
I just think when you receive this email, you could be easily forgiven for not realising that you're being summoned to the end.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Slightly tone deaf, I would say, most charitably.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
She had a pretty poison chalice. I'm not saying she's a bad person for doing this or anything like that.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Karen, Vine's chief optimism officer, had lost her battle. Her vision for the app, courting creators, curating content first, was too far ahead of its time.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
The fact that the 1600 Group have succeeded in getting Vine management to come meet with them on their own turf is no small achievement when you consider that they're just a bunch of self-made creators now dealing with a tech giant. The shiny conference room already makes it clear they want to be taken seriously as professionals, as grown-ups.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
And just like that, Vine was dead. Not with a bang, but with an email. There we go. Vine's dead. That's it. Vine's done. But you know what's not done? This story. We've got some more to dig into, Mary. And a few more people we need to talk to.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
In a way, without being too cheesy, Vine dying is almost the beginning of the story. All the way back in episode one, I promised that if you want to understand TikTok and the tech world of today, you need to understand the story of Vine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
It's a meeting that will shape the fate of Vine and the internet forever. It's a bright day in Los Angeles, California in autumn 2015, and in a building just a stone's throw from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a meeting is about to change the course of history. It's taking place in the conference room of an apartment block where a group of online creators live and make videos together. The address?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
I did promise that. And I like to keep my promises. And this is the point in this upcoming final episode. This is the point where we will make that connection between how this little six second app got us to the world that we're in now. On the final episode, the autopsy, the funeral, and the lasting legacy of Vine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Karen was leading the group on behalf of Vine, and of course Twitter, who were ultimately the ones in control, and perhaps more importantly, the ones who controlled the purse strings. It had already been made very clear to Karen that there were hard financial limits on any initiatives she wanted to bring in.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
You can listen to Vine's 6 Seconds That Changed the World on Global Player. Download it from the App Store or go to globalplayer.com. Vine Six Seconds That Changed the World is a Global Original podcast, created and hosted by me, Benedict Townsend, and produced by my co-creator, Mary Goodheart.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Narrative and creative by producer Kevya Cardoso, score and sound design by Patrick Lee, and mix by Chris James. Sophie Snelling is the executive producer, Al Riddell is head of factual podcasts, and Vicky Etchells is director of podcasts at Global. This is a Global Player Original Podcast.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
By this point, Karen has been in her role for just a few months, but she's become very familiar with the many frustrations creators have.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Unfortunately, the 1600 group was not interested in conversations about new creative opportunities. Airing their grievances may have had some therapeutic value, but first and foremost, their eyes were set on the financial prize. Something which, unknown to the Vine team, had actually been in the works for months.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
That's Brendan McNerney again, you know, the mid-level creator who had inns with 1600 Vine. He'd segued into producing more experimental content, but still took a keen entrepreneurial interest in the evolution of Vine and was well-connected in techie circles. With a unique insight into both sides of the equation, Brendan could see the writing on the wall early on.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Brendan and other creators were interested in pushing Vine to make changes that would help with monetization, but they were considering different schemes, which to them seemed much more realistic.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
But while Brendan and others were still discussing potential monetization strategies, the 1600 group were going for gold.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
It's exactly what Karen has been trying to avoid.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
I need you to take in the insanity of this scene. A group of barely 20-something internet goofballs.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Pranksters who we've seen tase each other, make fart jokes, strip down in shopping malls, jump into strangers' trolleys, scream profanities, eat spaghetti with a drill, perk their pecs to the beat of a pop song. We've done a lot of dumb things. This is the dumbest thing we've ever done.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Those guys were holding one of Twitter's biggest products for ransom, listing off their demands and threatening to pull the trigger if they aren't met. The 1600 group understood the power they held and the headaches they could cause. But in other ways, lacking any real industry knowledge, they seem to seriously misjudge the reality of the situation.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
They don't know about Karen's three-tier rescue plan. To her, they are not the long-term future of the platform. But she still doesn't want them to kick up a fuss and frighten off users. They are the VIVs, the very important finers, the bullet that can't be removed yet.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
She wants to keep them around just long enough that her cherished Ivy Leaguers and Sprouts can grow big enough to knock them off their platform. It was, if I can take some dramatic license, like a polite, slow-motion coup.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
One million dollars. I mean, in the real world, well, in my world anyway, that's a lot of money. But in the world of big tech, it's barely a drop in the ocean. What's a million bucks to Twitter? Was that all it was going to take? In a way, was this kind of a bargain? A one-off lump sum to stop all your creators complaining? To set your house in order?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
To buy Karen the time she needs to shepherd Vine into a new era?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Karen and the team flew out of LA flustered but triumphant with a deal that would be an easy sell to the big bosses. The end. I was just joking. Imagine if that was the end of the story. Just picture me closing the cover of a big dusty storybook. The end. Oh, no, but of course, it was all too good to be true. You see, there was just one tiny detail that hadn't quite been communicated properly.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Was anything written down? Obviously, there's an NDA, but did they present you with like a little charter of requests or anything? Well...
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Each. It wasn't one million dollars. It was one million dollars each. One small word that made all the difference.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Marcus Johns, a Florida-born Vine star. He'd made it into the top five most followed people on Vine, becoming a classic 1600 creator, churning out an impressive volume of collaborative comedy skits. He built a big profile with brands and even worked as a social media correspondent covering the 2014 Oscars red carpet.