Jack Dorsey is the co-founder of Twitter and Square, two multi-billion dollar businesses.
He could have had a third app worth 50B+, but he wasted his opportunity when it was in its prime.
In 2013, Vine exploded as the next social media app with 6-second videos that launched careers of today's celebs like Logan Paul and Lele Pons.
Vine was the OG short-form video platform, shaping the future of content as we know it. Because of that, It became the most downloaded app in 4 months and boasted 40M subscribers by the end of the year.
Fast forward to today, TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Youtube Shorts dominate the short-form game, while Vine's a distant memory.
What went wrong?
The original short-form video
In June 2012, Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll turned their video editing tool into a social platform.
6-second videos aided by the looping feature that defined the app.
The is what skyrocketed their success. So much that they sold Vine to Twitter for a cool $30 million before it even launched.
And at it's peak, people were creating 30M Vines every month.
These videos were often hilarious skits or quirky, random moments that morphed into legendary memes. It had a unique comedic style that you still see on Tik Tok today, but there was something different about Vine's eccentric humor that people couldn't get enough of.
As part of the acquisition, the founders joined Twitter, and Vine was officially unveiled the following year, taking the world by storm.
The app’s future looked bright, but Twitter failed to address some key issues.
The video platform wars
Vine clung to its 6-second time cap for too long without innovating past it.
By the time they upped it to 140 seconds in 2016, Instagram had already taken over.
But that's not the whole story.
You know every content creator has dreams of moving to a mansion in LA. So, when creators discovered that Vine had no plans to monetize, the platform's biggest stars jumped ship and shifted their focus to YouTube, where they found better engagement and monetization opportunities through creator funds.
Aside from creating sponsored videos for brands, there was no way for Viners to earn money directly through the app.
Vine's time cap also limited creativity, while Instagram rolled out 15 second videos.
And more of these creators started to get popular on youtube with long-form vlogging.
The avoidable downfall
By 2016, Vine's golden era was over. It had no stable revenue structure and was hesitant to compromise on video length.
The app's early success had faded, and the app was barely hanging on.
A group of 18 Viners, who were responsible for driving billions of views to the app, presented a list of demands to Karyn Spencer, Vine's Creative Development Lead.
They demanded a $1.2 million payout for each of them, along with specific platform improvements, in return for 12 monthly Vines per creator.
The group also requested stronger filters to combat abusive comments, the ability to add links in captions, and overall improved in-app video editing tools.
And if they didn’t comply, they would leave the app for good.
However, Vine didn't budge. The executives at Twitter were worried if they pay Viners to stay, the creators on Twitter might start demanding money for their tweets as well.
Growth slowed, and influencers took their audience and fully migrated to other platforms.
A year later, Vine shut down, missing out on a potential $50B+ app.