As tensions rise, battle lines are drawn. Creators want money. Leadership want control. Founders turn their back on their biggest stars. And Twitter watches from the sidelines as its $30 million acquisition flounders. Behind the scenes - Benedict and Mary chase down the one person who might know who really pulled the trigger.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:GOFRESH/YouTube/’Jerome jarre and nash grier (mobbed iceland)’NBC News/ Today/’In wake of layoffs, is Twitter in trouble?’HQ Trivia Theme/Intermedia LabsArtwork acknowledgments:Cathleen DovolisBrandon Moore B BowenNicholas FraserJames MoroskyAva Ryan
Chapter 1: What did we learn about Sweet Baby Vine in the last episode?
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.
Chapter 2: Who were the top creators on Vine and how did they operate?
Essentially, these top creators at 1600 Vine were like the Vine mafia. They controlled what was popular on the app because the app was not algorithmic. It was very susceptible to manipulation by the top creators. And the top creators all joined together, about 20 of them.
And they would plan out their content and they really created this click where like they would refine each other's content, essentially resharing each other's content and collaborate and manipulate what became popular on the app. You're a content creator. You post one video, you have it refined by the 20 other most popular creators.
creators on the app like that's going to be a top video on the app now and they had this kind of cadence to their schedule they would wake up every morning they would meet off and down by the pool at 1600 vine they would brainstorm ideas script things out for the day spend the afternoon recording and then edit and post and yeah they had this machine going for a while
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.
Chapter 3: What led to the confrontation at 1600 Vine?
I mean, you can feel the foreshadowing, can't you?
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.
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.
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.
I do have a lead.
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Chapter 4: Who is Karen Spencer and why is she significant?
I'm very intrigued.
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
Yes, this name Karen has come up quite a few times.
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.
Especially because those are two worlds that seem to be in almost constant tension.
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.
So she was in the room. She was in the room. And she led that meeting.
Yeah.
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.
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Chapter 5: What was the impact of Magcon on Vine creators?
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.
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.
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?
The bag swinging from her bag. It's got the Vine logo on.
It's got the Vine logo on.
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.
It's a sign.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did Vine face as it tried to monetize?
Apparently, I don't know what I'm doing and I should just stick with that. I think that there was a landscape of competitiveness in which if you posted a video and it didn't do well, you're kind of looking around at your Vine friends like, was that a bad idea? Am I not funny? Oh God, am I not funny? And I think that that was what started it.
And then I think it became about maintaining a certain level of performance from a metric standpoint that ultimately meant my worth, the CPM that I could target is now devalued.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yep, Dom left within the first year, Colin shortly after. I can't speak to the reasons why Dom and Colin left specifically, but it was a big hit to the company each time we lost a founder. And I think it certainly changed the trajectory.
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?
Yeah, it felt surprising, you know, I felt a bit let down, but I knew they had their own personal reasons and they had their own plans for what they wanted to work on next. No hard feelings, but it did start to feel lonely after a while.
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Chapter 7: How did the departures of Vine's founders affect the platform?
On Tuesday, Twitter, the social networking service, announced it is eliminating some of its staff, laying off as many as 336 employees, roughly 8% of its workforce.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But none of this, of course, would be Russ's concern for much longer.
I did my full three-year contract before coming up with my next product idea. Ultimately, I felt like, okay, I have another idea that I'm really passionate and curious about that I want to explore. And it seems like there's a strong team here that can
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.
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.
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Chapter 8: What was the work culture like at Vine during its peak?
So there was definitely an awareness for me of Vine when it launched. And then, you know, we were working with a lot of Viners.
But how was the traditional media old guard responding?
What I saw was an extreme allergy towards quote unquote influencers that, you know, still exists today in one form or another. The creator economy has been around long enough and it has proven itself to be quite quite a powerful engine and a monetization machine that. It's really not disputable anymore that social media creators have and wield a lot of power.
But in early days, I mean, it was just nothing but eye rolls in San Francisco. And like, oh, my God, who are these people on social media? And why are they getting paid $100,000 for a six second ad? And, you know, there was I very rarely ever heard someone supportive of it and not critical of it.
When an opportunity to work directly with Vine came up, it seemed like a clear match.
I heard that Vine was looking for a head of creators, and I went and interviewed with them. I was not really a user of Vine at that time. I was definitely hiring and working with Vine stars, so I was aware of it, but I didn't have that daily habit of being a Vine consumer. So I had to kind of like quickly get up to speed on that.
And Twitter had a policy at the time that you'd be interviewed by like eight different people. And if you didn't get an enthusiastic yes and a thumbs up from everyone, then you wouldn't be hired. If even one person had a reservation, you wouldn't be hired. So I thought, okay. It's never in my life have I had a group of eight people all enthusiastically like me. So this is not going to happen.
And I guess maybe because I just didn't even think it was possible. I didn't really go into the interviews with much fear or nervousness. And I was shortly hired thereafter. Wow.
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?
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