Withered on the Vine: ecosystems cannot survive without care and attention

Twitter’s decision to close down Vine, an initial success but which later generated little interest, taken in the context of cutbacks and sackings, shows that no matter how good or useful they might be, cannot survive if nobody uses them.

Twitter acquired Vine in October 2012 for $30 million from Cabana, founded three months earlier and never launched. The idea behind the app, limiting Vine’s videos to six seconds, resonated pretty well with Twitter’s original project, and a a number of creators rose to the challenge, and the service was hit: six months after its launch, it was attracting 13 million regular users, and three months later that figure tripled. For a while, especially after the app allowed the use a front camera in 2013, Vine, with its short, endlessly looping videos, was the place a good number of social media stars made their mark in numerous markets. Although Twitter never revealed detailed data, it said that its videos had an audience of around two hundred million people.

The problems came later. The spectacular rise of Snapchat, whose upcoming IPO could value it between $25 billion $35 billion, and Instagram’s launch of its 15-second videos in June 2013, made it clear that Twitter was not going to be able to maintain the traction necessary for the platform stay alive. The social media stars that had accumulated millions of followers on Vine began trying to negotiate payments for posting on the service, but the departure of Dom Hoffman, one of the original founders, and the rapid succession of changes in the management of the project froze the talks. By the time Twitter acquired social media talent agency Niche to handle the issue in February 2015, it was too late: the majority of its creators had left the service in search of greener pastures. From there on, everything went into free fall: the closure was simply confirmation of what we all knew: that practically nobody was using Vine.

If you want to succeed in the complex and volatile world of social media, it’s not enough for your service to be an interesting or challenging concept. You have to nurture the ecosystem, take in to account the various parties involved, find ways to reward those who invest effort in creating content for it, as well as building a network of alliances with those who may be interested in its development: advertisers , creators and users. Such services are platforms, and platforms only succeed if they meet the needs of all those involved in them. Only with serious dedication to these tasks can a service survive over time, exceeding the first phase of popularity and taking shape as a consolidated phenomenon. Vine was the beginning of something interesting, a trend that could have consolidated itself, but that instead allowed the competition to. Today, videos live on other platforms, and Vine is just as the memory of a very large fistful of millions of dollars thrown down the drain: in short, a textbook example of mismanagement.

(En espa?ol, aquí)