Vine is on the edge of collapse - creators are in open revolt, Instagram is circling, as Twitter turns a blind eye. With the sacred 6-second limit on the chopping block and creator trust hanging by a thread, time is running out. Enter Karyn, Vine’s newly hired Head of Creators – an outsider with a bold vision to save the app. Her strategy? A full-scale reinvention. But at a glittering Hollywood party packed with Vine’s biggest stars, it becomes clear: this rescue mission won’t be easy. The fate of Vine is teetering on the edge – and not everyone wants it saved. 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 PodcastsArtwork acknowledgments:Cathleen DovolisBrandon Moore B BowenNicholas FraserJames MoroskyAva Ryan
Chapter 1: What challenges was Vine facing in its decline?
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.
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?
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?
Chapter 2: How did Vine creators feel about the content on the platform?
No, there were kind of two problems with this. For a lot of the Vine staff, they actively disliked the content that was being produced. And it's not just a matter of different taste in comedy. They would have liked something more highbrow. There were real concerns that there was content that was quite racist, quite misogynistic. They didn't want this stuff there.
And the problem was because these videos were now accounting for such a big proportion of Vine usage, they kind of felt held hostage. They would have liked to have got rid of them in the way the platforms would now. But they felt like, well, if we get rid of this, then the creator will be annoyed and we'll go and they'll take all of these users with them.
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.
Yeah.
How can you fix the platform if removing this group will kill the platform?
And then the other problem is, yeah, sure, they are accounting for a huge proportion of the user base, but they're also now dominating it such a way that nothing else can grow. And so even if their proportion is huge, that doesn't make up for all the potential users that you've just lost because everything else has kind of died.
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.
Yeah. In the meantime, it means the platform has become this sort of single, quite homogenous thing. They've narrowed it to one kind of comedy and there's no space for the rest of the comedy to grow. Now, the dilemma that Karen has is how do we change that without removing the bullet and bleeding out?
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.
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Chapter 3: What strategy did Karyn implement to save Vine?
And we have a position that would be great for you working with creators, helping them grow and helping them learn positive and good posting patterns and what not to post and kind of like helping them along on their journey. And I was like, that's kind of cool and very helpful. And also like kind of wish I had that when I was starting out. Were you based in the Vine office?
Yeah, it was in the Twitter headquarters and Vine had their own floor.
So that must have been weird for you to go from being a Vine creator to being in the belly of the beast.
It was weird because I'd be walking around and some of the engineers definitely knew my stuff, which was funny. It was kind of my job to keep an eye on anyone who had potential or was blowing up or doing well. We would eventually reach out, maybe feature some of their stuff on certain channels to get new eyes on someone in a way that felt organic but also had a little bit of a backing.
Chapter 4: How did Karyn categorize Vine creators?
It was people who wouldn't have really had a shot otherwise.
And crucially, there were strategies to find new ways to promote creators who were previously being crowded out by Revine for Revine.
Revine would have parties or meetups or events that people could show up and feel like they were important or recognize people who had like a thousand followers, smaller people. So they felt like, oh, the app maybe does care. We would make channels for trends that were happening. Like we made a whole playlist for for a bunch of people who were like parodying and remaking it.
And we would do one-off things like that where we would make a playlist for a few days or creator spotlights where I would go in and find vines from like a creator's beginning to like current, curate a playlist of like 40 of their best vines. And a lot of people would discover new creators that way.
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.
I feel like my class of creators were really a dope class. I loved how they had a class of Viners every year and then they would have a Vine panel and Vine pushes them. And that was like a really great time. Karen and them like stepped a game up and made sure the next up and coming creators could be paid.
So what kind of stuff was she doing in the Vine days to sort of help you out?
She had like set up Vine events like when we went to New York. We did a short film in Wisconsin. She flew all of us out to Wisconsin. We did a camping trip. We filmed a short film and they flew us to L.A. for VidCon. We went to Disney. They rented out Denny's and IHOP, and we had free merch and our own panel. She gave us all community tabs, like spotlight pages, and we all got featured.
And then when people download the Vine app, our accounts will pop up on the suggested accounts. So we would get a whole bunch of new followers whenever people downloaded Vine just because.
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Chapter 5: What were the major changes in Vine's approach to creators?
twitter on vine so it's only so much she could do oh that's that that's the first i think we've heard of that so she would pay some pay you to go to events yeah that's quite smart i remember i never just fly to a different state i'm going to new york i ain't never been to new york that was like i was like yo and i get to stay at a five-star hotel and i don't have to pay for anything
You say, I can get how much? I thought $100 was a lot back then. Like one of them events, she paid all of us like $6,000. I was just like, I am a kid. I just graduated high school. I would love to take that. I was like, yes. And then all my friends kept telling me to go to college, go to school, do this, do that. And I'm like, no, I'm riding this wave until I can't ride it no more.
I love Karen for life, though. She showed nothing but love in me my whole career. Like, my whole career. Even after Vine, she made sure I had a manager when I moved to L.A. She made sure I had, like, some work. Like, Karen a goat. Like, she don't owe me anything. Karen done a lot for me, and I'm forever thankful. It's a hell of gratitude to her. That's right.
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.
It was a bad signal to the creators that they are now taken seriously. It's not just as a creator, an artist, or a performer, but as a career. And Karen...
made me want to become an ambassador for vine karen made me proud of oh i'm a vine creator and like i now have a google sheet that you know manages all my income and i'm looking at my brand deals and i'm looking how much i'm investing in in products and i'm treating this like a business and i have an in at a platform you know that was acquired for 30 million by twitter or whatever and you know it's just like oh this is now a job this is who i am
I like this identity and I have somebody who's on my side and trying to take my career to the next level. I got that with Karen and never had that before.
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?
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Chapter 6: How did Vine's monetization issues affect creators?
Yeah, you can't deny the difference in mood is massive. I've got to say, there's a there's a thing niggling in my head, though.
Oh, here we go.
I mean, what we're talking about here, it sounds so positive. It sounds so good. But is this the vine that we love? Right. You know, if we think back to when we were first talking about the vine that Russ and the team launched, how chaotic and crazy it was.
Russ's whole thing was we're just going to make an amazing tool and we're going to hand the tool over to the public and we're going to see what they do. And that's where we got all of the magic moments and the complete chaos and random subversive stuff.
Karen's coming in and obviously she has her background as a talent agent and so she sees it differently and she's seeing the creators as actually part of the product and she wants to deliberately nurture and coax and, you know, that sounds so positive but that's a completely different beast, right?
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'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.
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.
I'm trying to think. This was like 2016. Instagram had just completely started to like... cleave off a huge amount of Vine's users. Instagram Stories, I think, had become a place for people to really share daily video from their lives. Instagram Video in the feed was becoming a popular place for creators to post video content. Same thing with YouTube and Facebook Video.
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Chapter 7: What was the significance of Karen's arrival at Vine?
It sucks for her because she's got to like maintain audiences in two places. And it sucks for all the people who are fans of her because I see it here and now I need to like leave this, go to YouTube, go find her, go watch this weird sort of like bifurcated experience that is only happening because of this six second limit.
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.
But Rich says there was a deep suspicion at Vine around the idea of making clips substantially longer.
I think we felt like you can't have a, it sounds so stupid now, but it's like, oh, you can't have a two minute video and a feed is so long. People are going to be, they're not going to go to the next video. And in reality, people are just like, when they're done, they just roll the next thing.
Of course, eventually they did extend the core length of Vines from six seconds to the incredibly obvious 140 seconds.
At the time, we decided to match what Twitter's max length was, which is like an asinine way to decide what the optimal video length is.
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.
I genuinely thought that us asking about how they landed on New Length was going to lead to a sort of comically complex thing of like, oh, yeah, we had boardrooms full of people. We had scientific studies. We had focus groups. We were experimenting. Like, I really thought that there would have been that much care put in it.
We spent five weeks studying exactly what a second is.
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Chapter 8: What were the implications of extending Vine's video length?
And we had this code red about the views declining, and I don't think they actually stemmed the decline. And when they wound it down, I was like, I think that's my first realization, like, oh, this might be a problem. We just threw everything into this, and it's not... and we're winding down this like Code Red, but we haven't actually like fixed the issue.
You know, we were technically working for Twitter. We were a team within Twitter, but we were like pretty disconnected from them in terms of like how we work together, but also just like geographically, because most of Twitter at the time was still in California.
And I remember maybe like a year into working there, I saw Twitter, the Twitter design team posted a photo of everyone hanging out internally. And I just like saw how many people were there. And I was like, Holy shit, what are they all working on, you know?
So how big was this Vine team at the time you joined on that top floor?
I'm going to say 60 people. Comparatively, you know, when we would travel literally around the globe to different Twitter offices, we saw the entirety of the Twitter staff, which was in the thousands, and compared to that... We didn't feel very big at all. The Vine offices when I joined were on the top floor of the New York Twitter offices.
You know, we just had desks, no walls, so we could see everybody in one glance. And when I interviewed for the company as someone who had been working externally at an influencer agency, I just thought like, wow. OK, so Vine is in the Twitter office and then Niche, which was the Twitter owned and acquired influencer agency, was also in that office.
And I just thought the powerhouse of this trio of companies like, wow, we can really dominate when we all work together. And it became really obvious as soon as I joined that Vine was essentially the redheaded stepchild of Twitter. And very few people who worked at Twitter used Vine, understood Vine, were fluent in Vine.
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.
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?
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