The term “influencer” has entered the mainstream, in large part due to the frat house ecosystem of Viners established by brothers Logan and Jake Paul. In this episode, Benedict and Mary search for one of Vine’s elusive founders, whose idea to simplify mobile video editing transformed modern internet culture. We want to trace Vine back to its very inception, understand who funded it, forged it in fire, and what happened the day Twitter came knocking.Credits:Benedict Townsend - Host & CreatorMary Goodhart - Producer & CreatorKevyah Cardoso - Narrative & Creative ProducerPatrick Lee - Sound Design & ScoreChris Janes - MixLucy Chisholm Batten - LegalSophie Snelling - Executive ProducerAl Riddel - Head of Factual PodcastsVicky Etchells - Director of PodcastsArchive acknowledgements:ABC News/‘Meet the Vine Stars Who Turn 6 Seconds of Fame into Big Bucks’PacificRimVideoPress/’Vine Famous Jake Paul Interview about Getting Girls, High School, Fave Shoes & More!’HLN/’Logan Paul: How to be Vine-famous in 6 seconds’/CNN Worldwide60 Minutes Overtime/’Social media influencer Logan Paul talks to "60 Minutes”’/CBS NewsSquawk Alley/’Jake Paul Talks Transitioning From Vine Star To Disney Star’/CNBCNetflix Sports/’Jake Paul Wins | Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson’/NetflixArtwork acknowledgments:Cathleen DovolisBrandon Moore B BowenNicholas FraserJames MoroskyAva Ryan
Chapter 1: What happened in the meeting at 1600 Vine Street?
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.
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.
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.
Excuse me, man in the muscle shirt. Did you get any muscles with that shirt? Help me first!
I'm saying to you, he's already gone. Yeah, but that back lift though.
What's up, guys? I'm just chilling with my boy Jerome.
My name's not Jerome, you stupid white motherf***er.
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.
The guys you're about to meet have more followers than the biggest celebrities, and just one post can earn tens of thousands from advertisers.
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Chapter 2: Who were the key figures behind Vine?
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.
Within a couple of days, I was in Grand Central Station and I recorded this like stop motion kind of animation thing of people walking through the big hall of Grand Central Station and it made the popular page. And that was like a huge deal for me at the time, you know.
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?
What do we know about them?
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.
So that leaves us with Dom and Russ.
Okay, so Dom Hoffman. What's his vibe?
Yeah, Dom, interesting guy. Quite elusive.
Yes.
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Chapter 3: How did the Paul brothers rise to fame?
For a while in the Vine prototype, you had to tap on the video to load it before it played. And being inspired by GIFs, we... made the decision to just make them play automatically and load automatically. So we started loading a video before it entered the viewport to make the experience even faster. So while you're watching a video, the next video would already start loading.
And we made it autoplay, which is another innovation that didn't exist on the internet before Vine. After launching Vine, YouTube started autoplaying videos and pretty much every other video platform started doing the same. And this endless feed of videos became part of the core experience of Vine.
Can we pause on this a second? Because I don't think I knew that Vine were the first to do autoplay.
Yeah, definitely the first to popularize it, which is kind of crazy when you think of the ripple effect onto the world today.
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.
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?
Destroying us? Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of, I'm really impressed, but I'm also a little bit furious with them.
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.
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.
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