In a high stakes meeting with Vine’s top creators, a one-million-dollar demand threatens to upend the platform. What started as a push for collaboration spirals into chaos, with creators leveraging their power and Vine’s leadership scrambling to respond. Was this bold move the cause of Vine’s demise, or just one piece of a much larger story? Credits:Benedict Townsend - Host & CreatorMary Goodhart - Producer & CreatorKevyah Cardoso - Narrative & Creative ProducerPatrick Lee - Sound Design & ScoreChris Janes - MixLucy Chisholm Batten - LegalSophie Snelling - Executive ProducerAl Riddell - Head of Factual PodcastsVicky Etchells - Director of PodcastsArchive acknowledgements:Marcus Johns/ Co VinesMarcus Johns/ InstagramInside Edition/ ‘20-Year-Old Disney Channel Star Terrorizing Neighbors With YouTube Stunts’Logan Paul/YouTube/’Viners React to Vine Shutting Down!’CBS News/CNET/’It’s official: Twitter Shut Down Vine’Artwork acknowledgments:Cathleen DovolisBrandon Moore B BowenNicholas FraserJames MoroskyAva Ryan
Chapter 1: What meeting changed the fate of Vine?
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?
1600 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...
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.
Hey, what's up, man? How you doing? How's it going? Marcus Johns.
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.
Angelina, Brad, adopt me, please! Please adopt me! I'm a good child!
These days, his vibe is a little different.
I just wanted to say that being a daddy is the best thing that anyone can have happen to them.
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Chapter 2: Who are the key players at 1600 Vine?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What demands did the creators make?
Chapter 4: How did the Vine team respond to creator grievances?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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Chapter 5: Why did the creators threaten to leave Vine?
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.
I remember my reaction to hearing at the time was like, brother, we don't make no money. Where are we going to get a million dollars for you from? We don't sell ads. But, you know, it's a symptom of you created this culture where you empowered 100 people
to be the lifeline to the entire product and then like when those people decide to use their leverage you're in deep shit that's sorry like that's that's your problem like you you hitched this entire thing on you know 20 21 year olds who at any point could just decide like actually like we're not getting paid for this we can go anywhere else and like their audience will come and they were right you know
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.
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?
I mean, this is the thing is that the kind of the sticking point was Vine didn't have the resources available. But the question of whether what they were producing had the value that they were assigning to it is a different question. And yeah, it sounds ridiculous. But actually, I mean, according to Brendan, maybe they were kind of spot on with their calculations.
I mean, just using a CPN calculator right now... CPN, if you've forgotten, is how much money brands would be willing to pay a creator based on how well their videos performed. Somebody that's driving you maybe half a million views on a singular video, that's a $12,500 video. And you're looking at creators that are generating... 12.5 K in potential impressions per video.
They're uploading it three times a week. They're doing that for four weeks during the year. You're already looking at about $150,000 a month in like just a standard CPM on impressions that run rates over a million dollars a year. Like that's like one and a half million dollars. And they're asking for a million dollars for their video.
existence on the platform so to not think that from a vine perspective you can squeeze that out of them if you can squeeze profitability out of paying them a million dollars is like just at the time if the industry wasn't there i just don't think the foresight was there to say yeah these people are worth a million dollars i think the audiences were well worth a million dollars and they just didn't they just didn't click that i just i don't think they had that perspective i
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Chapter 6: What was the financial offer discussed?
The true conversation that was happening was like, everybody sub that tier was fucking pissed. We were like, why them? Like, they don't push the bounds creatively. At least at that point, that wasn't there. It was, you know, videos that are still memed today. But like, it was stuff that, you know, we're like, oh, really? Like, that's your idea?
Like the idea that some other smaller binder had six months ago with like a slightly different twist. Yeah. I think everybody was just pissed. We were like, you know, the immediate aftermath was like the fact that that meeting even took place. It just felt like this weird succession style summit.
Like, you know, it's like the evil geniuses getting together and like, you know, controlling as Illuminati. It just felt weird. And we were just kind of like, yeah, this is the ecosystem that we live in where, you know, everybody else who's like getting together and throwing vine parties and, My entire group of friends in LA at one point was, like, 25 people deep. Everybody was a Viner.
And, like, it was just, like, this is the community you're ignoring versus those people who, like, talk shit on each other left and right and have beef in the comment sections. Like, come on. So yeah, I think it was just disappointment and frustration from a lot of people after that meeting took place.
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.
Although I knew and I'd met up with a lot of those Viners, that wasn't my, you know, we called ourselves like the indie group. Even though we weren't indie, like we still all had millions of followers, we weren't quite at the tens of twenties of millions of followers. And so we were continuing, my group was continuing to make content and enjoy the app and have fun.
But we weren't aware that these conversations were happening. And so it would have been nice to kind of know about it so that I could take my 3 million followers and be like, hey, follow me on YouTube and Instagram and like, let's keep this thing going. It was kind of abrupt and weird. And like, why are they doing this? This seems a bit entitled. I remember thinking... Sure.
Yeah, I guess we should be getting paid. But also remember, before this app existed, you weren't doing anything. So like, where's the gratitude? Of course, we should be compensated for our efforts. You know, if we weren't creating, then people wouldn't care about the app and the app would have just not. really done well. I always see both sides. I'm a Libra, so I see both sides.
Like, I'm just grateful that this app exists, so I'm going to give it what it's given me. And so to think that, you know, 20 people were like, we want this amount of money, and if we're not paying this, then we are leaving. It's like... Could you have demanded less money, maybe? I don't know. Like, can you ask for, like, a hundred grand each?
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Chapter 7: What was the misunderstanding about the million-dollar request?
I think they were just, like, their ego got so inflated and then they just assumed that they'd be taken care of with these other apps. And they lost... so many followers, and they're not as successful as they were on Vine.
There's definitely an ecosystem. Everyone needs everybody and everything to keep that app running.
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.
When the popular people, I guess, pulled back and jumped ship, like, when I'm making those parody Vines or I'm, like, making fun of trends, like, that's not really there anymore because those guys are gone. So then you're, like, making other Vines or whatever. So it's like, there's definitely an ecosystem. And so the Vine started diminishing and started being less of what it was.
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.
I would go to the popular page and I would see that the biggest videos of the day only get like 5,000 likes in like three hours, which is a lot of people. But when you compare it to the peak of Vine, I'd say this is like 2014, 2015. The number one on the popular page, we get like 100,000 likes in like an hour. It was crazy. So when you see that, you go, oh, this thing's on the way out.
You prepare for it. I prepared for it. I think I just kind of knew I was like, this is not going to last long. It's very fun, but it's like college, you know, doesn't last. You make experiences there and you cherish those, but then you move on. You get a job somewhere else, you know, at a firm.
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?
Oh, well, my page was more active at like 500, 600K than when I had like 1.45 million followers. I was like, what's going on here? I literally had the last viral video on Vine. And you want to know how many likes it peaked at? What was it? It peaked at 81,000 likes. That's how much activity was lost on Vine.
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Chapter 8: How did the fallout affect Vine's community?
And it was to the degree that, like, I was pretty confident it was going to happen. I was already, like, I was planning to leave. I was, like, ready to... I was already, like, halfway out the door. And it's funny, like, literally the night before they did, um...
uh layoffs i was looking to find um uh the gm because i was going to tell her like you know if we could just be above board for a minute i'm not sticking around so if there's layoffs you know one of the other guys on the team like he wants to stay you should keep him and you should let me go because i'm not sticking around but i couldn't find her and so then uh the next morning we had an email it was like hannah used to do these like
Yeah, like this is very common. Like GMs or heads of company do like their weekly like top of mind thing, whatever. And her thing was called the Tiger Times. Something about like her. It was like part of her brand, like calling herself like the tiger or something like that. I don't really remember why, but it was like. Hey, dudes, like got a really important meeting tomorrow morning.
So it'd be like super cool if you guys could jump. It could be like in the office tomorrow. And when I saw that, I knew that meant like, OK, like we're all like this shit was going down. But it was like such a bizarre, like this, like weirdly like excited way to be like, hey, gang, you're all like you're all about to get shit canned. And so then we showed up to the office the next morning.
She did some announcement that they were basically shutting down the app and that like a handful of people would be asked to stick around for three months to like sunset it basically. And then we all did like one-on-one conversations with like her and HR or whatever.
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.
Yeah. Yeah. Rich has sent it. It is as he remembers. And we've checked with another employee because we want to be sure. And they agree that this is what they sent.
It's been verified as real.
And I've sent it to you now. I mean, I've got to say, it's a little bit of comic likeness in the darkness of the end of Vine. But let's just bear in mind...
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