On October 27, 2016, Twitter announced that they will be discontinuing Vine. For those that are unfamiliar with the popular social media app, Vine is a short-form video sharing service where users can share six-second videos that play on a continuous loop. Vine was founded in 2012, and in its 4 year lifespan it has accumulated over 200 million users. The app owed its success to content creators who captured interesting moments of their lives, made various sketches, parodies of trends, etc. It was a shock to me when I first found out about the news because of Vine’s heavy cultural impact in our generation.

Fellow COMM101 blogger Suprahbe Ballary’s post, “Growth vs. Sustainability”, explains the importance of companies to adapt new technology to their products and services in order to maximize productivity and stay competitive. I could not agree more. Vine’s failure is a testament that companies must keep up with their consumer’s desires and strive to gain new competitive advantages.

Although there were several problems that led to Vine’s downfall, the most prominent issue that they all fall under was their inability to adapt to changing users’ desires. McGrath’s Transient Advantage Theory explains how Vine’s stagnant approach to their service led to their demise. The Transient Advantage Theory states that a company must constantly adapt to volatile customer needs by always looking for a new competitive advantage over competitors. This especially applies to the social media industry because of the consumer’s unquenchable thirst for new content to satisfy their boredom.

The first issue that Vine faced was that the producers of content felt they were not being compensated for their work. These “Vine Stars” generated a lot of traffic for the app by amassing billions of views on their videos. DeStorm Power, a prominent Viner who had over 6 million followers, explains in a video below that despite their contributions to the app’s success, Vine did not monetize their content or provide support to content creators for more opportunities. As a result, many Viners chose to shift their focus to other platforms which did financially incentivize their partners, such as YouTube.

In 2012, Vine was the predominant social media application for sharing short videos. However, other social media apps caught on and included video sharing as one of their services. For example, Instagram made it possible for users to share 15 second videos and with that, Vine lost its unique competitive advantage.

Instead of expanding to possible new features, Vine remained stagnant and stuck to their guns. With other social media apps, taking over their market share and content creators shifting to other platforms, the app died on the Vine.

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References

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-twitter-shutdown

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/25-things-know-vine/87383/

https://hbr.org/2013/06/transient-advantage

https://blogs.ubc.ca/suprabheballary/