Have you heard of Vine? It was the original TikTok. Here's what went wrong and what entrepreneurs can learn.

Vine had 200 million active users, then shut down. Already around during the Vine heydey, one of Vine's competitors TikTok would go on to surpass 1 billion users in 2021. So what happened? Below is a breakdown of the research into sections that offer insights and takeaways for founders and social media superusers alike.

Sections: Summary, Founding and Early Acquisition, Rise to Popularity, Competitors on the Horizon(The Fall of Vine), How TikTok Innovated, Lessons Learned(🌟).

Summary

TLDR: Vine failed to help its creators monetize and they left.

Vine lost popularity and was later shut down because competitors won over their creators. Vine perhaps would have had a better ability to adapt and serve its users if it had better leadership.

Vine's Founding and Early Acquisition

Vine was founded in 2012 and shortly after was acquired by Twitter for a reported $30 million prior to launching in 2013.

Originally Vine was designed to share videos, but pretty quickly users started being creative with the concept of the "loop" that Vine had introduced.

In its earliest days, Vine was simply 6-second looping videos presented in a feed. Here are some sample Vines below, scroll below the video to keep reading.

Vine's Rise to Popularity

Vine rose to popularity very fast. They enjoyed steady growth over the year following their founding(2013).

2014, which would later be seen as the peak of Vine's popularity, produced countless memes and internet celebrities.

Vine was the first to market with a form of video creativity that the world had never seen, but first to market only gets you so far...

Competitors on the Horizon (The Fall of Vine)

As Vine was growing so were other platforms. Even in the early days in 2013 Vine watched as Instagram launched short videos.

Other platforms were coming in fresh - which meant that they were more willing to experiment with the format(for example longer videos) and could offer things Vine could not(for example Instagram could offer better promotion through "celebrities").

Meanwhile, Vine sat on its hands.

Vine's founders were reluctant to monetize.

Parent company Twitter had bigger fish to fry.

By 2016, 3 years after its founding, Vine was starting to sputter out. At this point, they had lost most of their creators to competitors Youtube, Instagram, and Snapchat (TikTok was still small potatoes). (Note: what do we mean by "lost creators"? We mean that those who had designed content for Vine were now designing content for other platforms instead.)

By the end of 2016, they had thrown in the towel. Marketer dollars had left for other platforms, creators were gone. The entire service was shut down in 2017.

How TikTok Innovated

TikTok rose to popularity with its own story.

It would be unfair to say that they succeeded because Vine failed, however, it can also be said that if Vine had delivered on the original mission to be a creative source for short-form video, they would have had a very different landscape to compete in.

The main thing that TikTok did so well that Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube had not done was the auto-feed algorithm. With this algorithm it no longer required users to follow people - or to declare what their interests were - you could simply watch. And watch we do hahahh.

Lessons Learned

In the top graphic (pasted below) did you see the other apps that were on that list that are not what they could have been? (Skype, Foursquare, Flickr)

Here are several lessons entrepreneurs can learn from this story:

Having a growing user base is a good sign, but it is not in itself defensible.

As we saw with TikTok(Vine), Zoom(Skype), Pinterest(Flickr), and Facebook(Myspace) to name a few, a new team can learn from the mistakes of industry incumbents and build a product that provides better value to end-users.

Monetization is important.

While it is up to the founders of Vine to say whether it was worth sticking to their values and being reluctant to take money from brands, the market has a mind of its own. Founders must focus on making a sustainable business (often synonymous to profitable) for themselves and especially for their partners (in this case creators).

Acquisitions greatly impact company trajectory.

Had Twitter not acquired Vine it is undeniable that they would have had a different story. No one can say precisely, although it is possible they would have been pressured to monetize earlier and that they would have fought harder to innovate instead of shut down had they remained an independent company.

THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON Even the big dogs can be toppled.

Entrepreneurs! Creators! Friends! Let this be a reminder that you can do anything! Even if there is some giant monopoly or controlling source or industry behemoth - if you focus on providing a better product to your end users you can enter any industry. And if you are lucky enough, you might just be the next TikTok.

PS listening to a story like this offers insights as to why a company like Facebook would rebrand and focus on emerging technology like the metaverse.

PSS as a footnote towards understanding how startups can defeat large companies with perceivable immeasurable power here is some recommended reading (Hamilton's 7 Powers).

What did you think about this article? Please give critical feedback and insights about how these articles can improve!

Articles cited and referenced in this article:

Richter, Felix. “Infographic: Vine Is the Fastest-Growing App in the World.” Statista Infographics, 21 Oct. 2013, https://www.statista.com/chart/1553/fastest-growing-apps-worldwide/. 

Newton, Casey. “Why Vine Died.” The Verge, The Verge, 28 Oct. 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-twitter-shutdown. 

“Vine (Service).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 27 Dec. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service).