Mary Goodhart
Appearances
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
And we know that this is leading to the confrontation. Yeah. We know exactly where this is going. And it's so frustrating because this is exactly the point where the mystery begins for us.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
A week of ominous silence. And then she's messaged me. We got her. Yeah, she just popped up going, sorry, here's my number. WhatsApp's better. And not only did she reply, but was so friendly and so genuinely enthusiastic and keen to talk about Vine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
okay so we up till this point we've been looking mainly at the creators who were and there's sort of a vague list of who we think is there but actually i have a lead on the side of vine hq so this is actually someone who has been mentioned to us a few times by creators this is a lady called karen spencer
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
So she joined Vine in 2015. According to her LinkedIn, she was head of creators, which already makes her kind of pretty fascinating because we're looking at this, you know, we've got the Vine team and then we've got the creators. They're sort of two separate worlds. And the fact that she was brought in to be a bridge between them already, I want to talk to her.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
This feels like one of those moments where it's worth us taking a pause because what Karen's just said is pretty big. No one from Vine was allowed to talk to Vine stars.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
I mean, it's not even just social media. There's a lot of modern companies. Uber doesn't exist unless they have drivers. So Uber as a platform looks like it's all about trying to get customers who want a Lyft. But actually, a really important part of their strategy has to be still convincing drivers to secure their work through the Uber app. Same with Deliveroo.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
It only works if restaurants think that being on Deliveroo is going to be the best option for them to get more customers.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Exactly. So in the course of reading about her, I found one article that just casually mentioned that she was there leading the conversation for Vine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
It is so incredibly clear that she has moved on with her life. Okay. And she has done it in the most dramatic way you could imagine. She's literally moved to Costa Rica. Right. She's living in the jungle. Right.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
There's been complete silence. So my fear is that she's someone who's gone. That was a fun bit of my life. I was very high achieving. And now I want to go live in the jungle and make pots.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
The bag swinging from her bag. It's got the Vine logo on.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
And I saw this and I was kind of at my wits end with this and just, it was like, oh, another post from her and look at her in the jungle and she's still not replied to me. And then this swung into shot and I was like, it's a sign.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
Because I feel like if she's still repping a bit of Vine swag, if we can call it Vine swag in the jungle, part of her heart, I think it still belongs to Vine.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
5. Do It For The Vine
I mean, you can feel the foreshadowing, can't you?
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
4. Not Demure
I remember even one of our videos from the IndieViners literally got verbatim copied by one of the
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
4. Not Demure
bigger viners and that got re-vined and so now they're getting credit for this idea that wasn't theirs meanwhile we posted our video like three months prior to that and it did really really well and people really really liked it but of course these bigger viners got the credit because all their friends who had millions and millions re-vined it and so
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
4. Not Demure
You know, those kinds of things were a bit annoying and I guess seemingly unfair.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
4. Not Demure
We're not all playing an even game, right? We're not all like getting authentic views because of the app's algorithm and the people who genuinely like it. Once a 10 million, you know, Viner is revining someone who has... Seven million like that video is going to take off.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
4. Not Demure
They're all smart for getting together and be like, we're all going to just create this team and refine each other's videos so that we become the top. It worked, you know, so good on them for being able to think like that, you know. I know we eventually kind of tried to think like that, but I don't even know if I ever revined other people's videos that I wasn't in.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
4. Not Demure
That's not to say that I wasn't revining content that I was in because you have to start playing the game.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Can we pause on this a second? Because I don't think I knew that Vine were the first to do autoplay.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
I mean, autoplay has changed so many things. And that is so much something that you do just think is part of the inevitable course of the internet. But they were the first to do that.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Destroying us? Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of, I'm really impressed, but I'm also a little bit furious with them.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Yes. So the three founders are Dom Hoffman, Russ Yusupov and Colin Kroll. So let's start with Colin Kroll. It's a sad start to our quest, unfortunately, because Colin is not here anymore. He was a computer scientist. He made his name with Vine and then later HQ Trivia. But he actually died in 2018 of an accidental drug overdose almost two years after Vine was shut down.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
So that leaves us with Dom and Russ.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
Yeah, Dom, interesting guy. Quite elusive.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
A little inconveniently elusive for our purposes. He's got an incredibly sparse Wikipedia page and an even sparser personal website.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
very much not and we have tried we've we've reached out on every single platform lord we have tried we've sent little moles into silicon valley you've got an indication now that maybe the answer is no so i tapped into a grapevine and i have been led to believe that a message from us has been put in front of his face and still nothing okay i i think that that's a no fair enough we can close the book on dom so that leaves us with russ yusupov what do we know about russ
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
2. Vine Street Confidential
so Russ a bit more promising there's quite a lot about him online after Vine he founded HQ Trivia along with Colin so he's got a bit more of a presence and we have actually managed to have human contact with him quite surprisingly I just cold emailed and said hello would you like to be on my podcast and
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
So we told Marcus... that it wasn't going to happen. All of those 1,600 Viners started just immediately making Vine saying, we're leaving Vine, follow us on Instagram. You know, all of our content is there.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
At the end of the night, Marcus Johns came over to me and said, hey, everybody from 1600 Vine would like to meet with you.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
We had to really accelerate the Ivy League plan. We took them to Japan. We took them to England. We took them on all these content creation trips. We took them to the White House. We made vines with Michelle Obama, which was truly an amazing event. King Bach was actually with us for that. And he got Justin Bieber to give him an unreleased track.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
So, you know, there were little sparks and high points after that meeting that made us feel like we were still going to survive and we were still going to make it.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Our sort of last hurrah, it was when we were desperately trying to do anything to compete with other platforms and stay alive. And we made this series called Camp Unplugged that when you look back on it, most of the cast of that long form series is quite famous now and doing very well for themselves.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Yeah. So those, I mean, I will say like big pats on the back for myself and the content team, because we had identified like these are all the next generation of successful creators. We just didn't have that. Like, really, I think we needed about six months for that tipping point to occur for them to be dominating the app. And we just didn't have that time.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Little did we know, we had also just been given a new general manager, someone external who came in. And I think the story goes that from the second she was hired, she was told, you know, like, hey, we're going to shut this app down and we're bringing you on to shut it down as gracefully as possible or something. But
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
We knew that we needed to just like hear them out because there was several years of pain and frustration that had not been voiced.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
We saw her as a huge enemy and, you know, everything was just literally falling apart around us.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Batch was the one who thought it would be clever to be a Viner and live on Vine Street. But it also was just kind of a coincidence that they lived at 1600 Vine, which was at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. There were some people who were not there. Logan Paul wasn't there. Jake Paul was there. King Batch was not there.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
King Batch has always kind of kept himself out of the gossip, out of anything. They could be construed as controversial. You know, he's just one of those like, I'm a nice guy and I want to surround myself with nice things, sort of a personality. So he wasn't going to participate, but but wanted to benefit from whatever it was they negotiated.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I was on vacation. I was in Albuquerque at my in-law's house. And my boss said to me, I know you're on vacation, but this meeting is mandatory. So there was like three hours of my father-in-law figuring out what the Wi-Fi password was for me to join the meeting. And then...
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
The I think it was the general manager at the time, Hannah, who said, you know, so we're going to close and effective today. Most of you will go home and be given a severance. But some of you will receive an email. And for those of you who do, you're not going to this won't be your last day. You've been chosen. to be part of the shutdown team. So I was one of those lucky people.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
So I went out and got really drunk in Albuquerque and then kind of dealt with the fact that while many of my coworkers had a three month severance that they got to sit at home and enjoy and look for jobs, I was I think maybe there were 12 of us given the task of closing the company.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
So for the next three months, I worked out my severance by packaging up all of the Vine merch that my coworker Jeremy and I had created, which was a huge success, by the way. Still to this day, Vine merch is a very valuable thing. item on the internet.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
And I just, I packed up everything that was left and sent it out to all of the creators who were reaching out and asking for it and, you know, wrote a lot of teary letters and tried to be the supportive, cheerleading mom that I always had been.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
I think Vine could have survived with the support of Twitter. If Twitter had any fluency around Vine, then they could have brought their own ideas to the table and really participated in a conversation about what the future roadmap looked like. It just comes down to timing and leadership and the support from Twitter as well. If
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
If every decision maker at Twitter was a regular Vine user, then I think we would have had a lot more internal support. But the story goes that Jack Dorsey was friends with the founders. And then when the whole thing fell apart, you know, he kind of lost heart for it. If anybody with any kind of foresight had just said, wait.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Maybe the problem here is that there's a bunch of people there with very little experience trying to figure things out with no mandate or no roadmap. So like, let's just put a couple of quite experienced people on this and let's give them one more year to turn it around.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Because I really think if we had had good leadership and we had had one more year, we could now be TikTok and Congress wouldn't be worried about the fact that our social media success is governed by China now. Yeah. I want to say we had a million daily active users when we closed, which I mean, hey, a ton of apps would kill for that kind of traffic. Right.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
But it seemed clear to Jack and the other Twitter leadership that the peak had come and gone and we were no longer growing. We were deteriorating. And like rather than just get to embarrassingly low levels, let's just kill it while it's still kicking.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Twitter had said, here's your budget. You can do all kinds of things with Viners to encourage them to create vines, but you can never pay them directly for content. Because Twitter was worried that if we worked out any kind of deal to pay Viners to make vines, that then they would also ask for the same deal to tweet.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
They didn't really understand that creators were always going to use Twitter as a marketing vehicle. And that they were very unlikely to ask for money in order to tweet. But it was a different thing. And I mean, we've seen now my favorite statement is Vine walked so TikTok could run. So we've seen now that TikTok, of course, you know, in early days had to pay a lot of creators. to make content.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
We just listened for quite some time to all of them talk about how unheard and unseen they had felt, which we all truly resonated with and understood, you know, and I was quite committed to like making Vine a better place for them. At the same time, There was always a voice in all of our heads saying like, OK, we get it. You don't feel like truly supported by a platform.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
But at the same time, you guys all are making way more money than any of us are. You know, like you you have used Vine as the platform by which you got famous and and made a lot of income. So yeah. Yeah, we get it. You feel sort of like emotionally scarred that you weren't being supported from the inside.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
But still, like, let's not negate the fact that you're quite successful because of this platform. We didn't say that in the room. Obviously, we didn't want to come across as combative. But we gave them a lot of opportunity to voice all of their distress. And we told them that we understood and that, you know, we are not the people responsible for that distress.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
We are the new people and we're really excited to create new things with them.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
And then the tone changed and it started to get kind of aggressive and ugly in the room. And there was some talk about how they all knew that if they ganged up and all decided to stop posting on Vine, like immediately that the whole app would cease to exist.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
They knew that basically they wielded all of the power and all of the eyeballs and all of the audience and that they could redirect that audience to Instagram and put us out of business quickly. And Marcus is quite smart. You know, he was definitely in over his head. He cited a couple of things.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
He had Googled sort of like Twitter's revenue and he was throwing around statistics talking about how essentially we could afford to pay them directly online.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
You know, so it's not ideal when you're in this new job and you've just had this party that you thought was a success the night before and you're excited. And like we were planning all these trips and all of these fun things to do because my mandate was from Twitter. Here's a pretty large budget.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
You can plan whatever you want to do with that budget to engage creators and make them post more vines because that was really the remit, right? It was like, let's get viners to make more vines. Instead, what was happening right then was a lot of the Viners were just posting Vines that said, follow me on Instagram. All my videos are now going to be on Instagram.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
They were just redirecting to Instagram because they were seeing so much growth with Instagram and they were seeing a decline in their numbers on Vine. And if they weren't getting the numbers that they wanted to on Vine, then they couldn't command the same brand partnership prices. So I get it. It was all a fallout from a need to continue to command high brand deals.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
But my job was to try and get them to make vines on Vine and not vines or videos that they were then going to share on every other platform, but make a vine using the Vine editing tools.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Um, so I went over with a couple of other people from Vine the next day to have this meeting with them. And, um, you know, it was like one of those kind of big glossy apartment complexes that also had a conference room that the residents could use. And so we were in this apartment conference room and it was like...
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
One of the things they really pointed to was the current YouTube marketing campaign that was out in the world. YouTube had picked like maybe eight of their biggest YouTube stars and they had subway wraps in New York with the creator's faces on them. They had huge billboards in Times Square and they wanted that kind of marketing push behind them and their creator personalities.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
They wanted us to help them become even more famous than they were. And, you know, again, they just didn't understand that there was not at all a financial landscape to make any of that happen or like a desire from anybody on the inside to make that happen.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
But the thought that we were never going to be allowed to pay creators was obviously a huge obstacle and one that we were facing in that meeting because the conversation started to turn towards, okay, now we've told you everything that we're mad at you guys about, now let's talk about how much money you're going to pay us.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
So Mark has said in the meeting, listen, we've figured out what we want from you guys. So we're going to post three vines a week for the next year. And for that, we want a million dollars.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
My thought and the thought of my coworkers who were at that meeting with me was like, this is great. If they're all agreeing to post regularly for a year, then in that year, we can get this strategy off the ground and we'll have a ton of content ready to go. This is the time that we need. And so we left that meeting quite excited because we felt like a million dollars.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
You know, of course, we were going to have to convince Twitter that it was going to be OK to pay creators for content. But we felt really positive, like, guys, we can do this. It's a million bucks. We'll go ask for it. And they had made us sign an NDA when we went into the meeting, which was hilarious because it was like immediately broken by all of them.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
But also, you know, how could I really sign an NDA and then go back and talk to a bunch of people at Twitter about the need for this money? The whole thing, you know, that is where like Marcus was smart. He was strategic. He was intelligent, but he was also just a kid and he was smart. trying to act as like a grown-up professional.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
And I gave him all the credit in the world because he did a good job, but he just was like missing a few key elements. So, you know, we had to kind of disregard that in the A as well. And
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
Jake Paul and Marcus Johns and, you know, every kind of top viner at the time, they were all the people who made those vines at 1600 Vine every day.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
We went back to Twitter and we started strategizing about how to set up this meeting with Twitter leadership and kind of really for the first time ever, like lay out the whole landscape, explain everything that was going on with Vine and plead to them for this release of a million dollars to pay these Viners to make vines.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
They followed up with that via email the next week. Marcus emailed over the proposal. And what he had not said in the room was that the ask was for a million dollars each.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
They literally said we want we will all make three vines a week for a million dollars. And they just didn't say that word each in the room. So I was thinking, oh, a million bucks. I can do this. We can swing this. We thought, of course, we're stupid. But we thought that the ask was for a million dollars for all of them. They each wanted a million dollars for the year.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
So that was like a 18, 19 million dollar ask. And I got on the phone with him and said, like, buddy, I don't think you understand. Like Vine has never made a penny before. So there is no way I could ever get $19 million unlocked for you guys. There's no way in hell. And he was like, I know how much Twitter makes. And I was like, yeah, but this isn't Twitter. This is Vine. We're nascent.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
We have never monetized. I don't think you really understand what it is that you're asking. And, um, and then as we were talking, you know, uh, Gabby, Gabby Hannah, um, texted me and said, Lele Pons told me what's going on. And even though I'm not a 1600 Viner, if I don't get a million dollars, I'm also not going to post.
Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World
7. The Battle of Vine Street
And so Lele had gone and told a whole bunch of people, you know, how excited she was that she was about to get Vine to pay her. And then the ripple effect just began. And I started getting texts after texts from all kinds of creators saying, oh, You have to make the same deal with us. So then we just knew there was no way this was ever going to happen.