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comScore reports just under 5m uniques for Vine.co last month. It may be down on the height of its popularity but 5m unique users is a decent mass of people to

comScore reports just under 5m uniques for Vine.co last month. It may be down on the height of its popularity but 5m unique users is a decent mass of people to monetise. Seems an odd thing to kill and not at least try to sell.

lquas 10y ago
I read on Reddit that they made an attempt to sell it but nobody was interested. I'm not sure how true that is, but it does seem very weird to kill off Vine.
cm3 10y ago
How relevant is that metric given that users will predominantly use the mobile app?
corobo 10y ago
How would you go about making any money off it though? Nobody's going to sit through an ad when the video is only a few seconds long
- Touche 10y ago
  I don't know the answer, but I do remember people saying that Google was making a huge mistake buying the unmonetizable YouTube.
  - corobo 10y ago
    YouTube is long form video though. Plenty of content to advertise on. Where are you going to cram ads in to vine without it being annoying enough for adblockers to nuke them?
    - ddorian43 10y ago
      Maybe show ads once every 20 videos ?
    - Touche 10y ago
      It's fun that we consider 3 minute clips to be "long form" nowadays. When YouTube was being bought people said that it only consisted of short amateur clips and copyright violations; two things advertisers would supposedly not be interested in. Now I'm not saying that Vine is the next YouTube or even that it is monetizable, just that "we haven't figured it out yet" is not a convincing argument, and surely its userbase would be appealing to some buyer.
      - corobo 10y ago
        Well to be honest I'm not a hive mind. When I said long form it's quite likely I was mistaken. I was under the impression YouTube started with 15 minute videos which is infinitely longer than 6 second clips or whatever vine is. "We're losing money on it and have to fire people from the main company we should probably not keep this thing alive and we dont want competitors to our main product now it does videos neither" is definitely a convincing argument
        Touche 10y ago
        What in Twitter's past makes you believe that b/c they are making this decision that it must be the right one? What decisions in their past instills this confidence? I think Twitter is just failing hard right now and the shit has hit in the fan with investors. They are now on the "let's focus on our core product" phase of failing and hey, maybe it'll work, but that doesn't mean Vine is worthless.
        cunotaco 10y ago
        For a very very long time, YouTube wouldn't let you upload videos longer than 10 minutes.
        a3poify 10y ago
        And then for quite a while after that, you had to "unlock" the capability by uploading a few videos.
    - mcbits 10y ago
      They could sell one-second blipverts, offering the option of two seconds to advertisers with a history of positive engagement.
      - corobo 10y ago
        That's probably a very grey area heading towards subliminal advertising (at least, some lawyer somewhere could claim so). I'm not sure on the legal status of that sort of thing.
        andai 10y ago
        I'm noticing very short ads on YouTube (about 5sec) which are cheaper and more effective (ime) than the longer ones, which are usually skipped before they communicate the message and cause (more) annoyance.
        corobo 10y ago
        We're in the realm of speculation here, not a lawyer etc. 5 seconds is a fairly decent amount of time if you count it out. Plenty of time to register what you're seeing. 1 second (and below) it might be possible to argue it's too short to register the advert consciously, making it a subliminal advert. Again I don't know if this is true and I'm completely making this up. It'd be interesting to find out the answer.
        mcbits 10y ago
        A second is enough time to consciously register an ad. To prove it, they could run a bit where someone shouts "50 percent?!" with a picture of an iPad and "Tap! 50% off". I'll bet people start tapping by the second or third impression (even though it's obviously a scam of some kind).
        DanBC 10y ago
        I've seen a few like that, and they're good. I've seen some which cram a lot into 5 seconds, and then tell you you can skip the rest. But I've also seen weirdly long ads - 10 minute ad on a 7 minute video, 30 minute ad on an hour long video. I'm also noticing some ads have a loud noise at the beginning of a 30 second skippable ad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxg7fse74MY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxg7fse74MY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1crwU9aUNHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1crwU9aUNHE It's really annoying. This is the kind of thing that drives people to ad-blocking.
- __derek__ 10y ago
  Why not the same way Instagram has? Or SnapChat? The most-prominent Vine users craft a brand, and companies can do the same thing if they're engaging enough.
  - corobo 10y ago
    I don't know how snapchat is monetized. An Instagram ad though is an image in a sea of images for the most part. Easy to digest, not worth skipping through while you're browsing images, they feel like they belong. I'm not sure you can replicate that with videos. I'm not sure what you mean by the Vine users crafting a brand though. Companies having a brand on Vine doesn't make Vine money.
- kristianc 10y ago
  Isn't the exact same criticism relevant to Snap too? They're solving it by bringing native content from partners on board - would have thought Twitter would do the same with Vine.
  - corobo 10y ago
    I don't know what snapchat are doing these days, my friend circle stopped using it a while back. I mean it's probably relevant if it's all still images/videos that delete themselves. How do they go about their adverts for the uninitiated?
    - kristianc 10y ago
      They have a section called 'Discover' where they've invited BuzzFeed, Cosmo, Sky News to produce native content for them that links to their web properties. They're consumed as part of the regular Snapchat experience and an extension of the Snapchat 'Stories' idea.
edwinnathaniel 10y ago
Vine "stars" are moving to Snapchat, they'll bring their viewers as well.
draw_down 10y ago
They're not killing the website. At least not yet.
cgusto 10y ago
I think this is the wrong way to look at Vine's impact. If you search Youtube for monthly Vine compilations (ie Oct 2016 Vines) these videos have millions of views - enough to make some of these Vine stars into minor celebrities (look up King Bach). Vine pretty much started the short form video craze. Twitter missed the opportunity to make it so people visited the Vine app to view these compilations, which would have maybe encouraged the creators to only make content for Vine. They dropped the ball, and now the top creators all use their competitors.

lquas 10y ago

I read on Reddit that they made an attempt to sell it but nobody was interested. I'm not sure how true that is, but it does seem very weird to kill off Vine.

cm3 10y ago

How relevant is that metric given that users will predominantly use the mobile app?

corobo 10y ago

How would you go about making any money off it though? Nobody's going to sit through an ad when the video is only a few seconds long

Touche 10y ago
I don't know the answer, but I do remember people saying that Google was making a huge mistake buying the unmonetizable YouTube.
- corobo 10y ago
  YouTube is long form video though. Plenty of content to advertise on. Where are you going to cram ads in to vine without it being annoying enough for adblockers to nuke them?
  - ddorian43 10y ago
    Maybe show ads once every 20 videos ?
  - Touche 10y ago
    It's fun that we consider 3 minute clips to be "long form" nowadays. When YouTube was being bought people said that it only consisted of short amateur clips and copyright violations; two things advertisers would supposedly not be interested in. Now I'm not saying that Vine is the next YouTube or even that it is monetizable, just that "we haven't figured it out yet" is not a convincing argument, and surely its userbase would be appealing to some buyer.
    - corobo 10y ago
      Well to be honest I'm not a hive mind. When I said long form it's quite likely I was mistaken. I was under the impression YouTube started with 15 minute videos which is infinitely longer than 6 second clips or whatever vine is. "We're losing money on it and have to fire people from the main company we should probably not keep this thing alive and we dont want competitors to our main product now it does videos neither" is definitely a convincing argument
      - Touche 10y ago
        What in Twitter's past makes you believe that b/c they are making this decision that it must be the right one? What decisions in their past instills this confidence? I think Twitter is just failing hard right now and the shit has hit in the fan with investors. They are now on the "let's focus on our core product" phase of failing and hey, maybe it'll work, but that doesn't mean Vine is worthless.
      - cunotaco 10y ago
        For a very very long time, YouTube wouldn't let you upload videos longer than 10 minutes.
        a3poify 10y ago
        And then for quite a while after that, you had to "unlock" the capability by uploading a few videos.
  - mcbits 10y ago
    They could sell one-second blipverts, offering the option of two seconds to advertisers with a history of positive engagement.
    - corobo 10y ago
      That's probably a very grey area heading towards subliminal advertising (at least, some lawyer somewhere could claim so). I'm not sure on the legal status of that sort of thing.
      - andai 10y ago
        I'm noticing very short ads on YouTube (about 5sec) which are cheaper and more effective (ime) than the longer ones, which are usually skipped before they communicate the message and cause (more) annoyance.
        corobo 10y ago
        We're in the realm of speculation here, not a lawyer etc. 5 seconds is a fairly decent amount of time if you count it out. Plenty of time to register what you're seeing. 1 second (and below) it might be possible to argue it's too short to register the advert consciously, making it a subliminal advert. Again I don't know if this is true and I'm completely making this up. It'd be interesting to find out the answer.
        mcbits 10y ago
        A second is enough time to consciously register an ad. To prove it, they could run a bit where someone shouts "50 percent?!" with a picture of an iPad and "Tap! 50% off". I'll bet people start tapping by the second or third impression (even though it's obviously a scam of some kind).
        DanBC 10y ago
        I've seen a few like that, and they're good. I've seen some which cram a lot into 5 seconds, and then tell you you can skip the rest. But I've also seen weirdly long ads - 10 minute ad on a 7 minute video, 30 minute ad on an hour long video. I'm also noticing some ads have a loud noise at the beginning of a 30 second skippable ad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxg7fse74MY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxg7fse74MY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1crwU9aUNHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1crwU9aUNHE It's really annoying. This is the kind of thing that drives people to ad-blocking.
__derek__ 10y ago
Why not the same way Instagram has? Or SnapChat? The most-prominent Vine users craft a brand, and companies can do the same thing if they're engaging enough.
- corobo 10y ago
  I don't know how snapchat is monetized. An Instagram ad though is an image in a sea of images for the most part. Easy to digest, not worth skipping through while you're browsing images, they feel like they belong. I'm not sure you can replicate that with videos. I'm not sure what you mean by the Vine users crafting a brand though. Companies having a brand on Vine doesn't make Vine money.
kristianc 10y ago
Isn't the exact same criticism relevant to Snap too? They're solving it by bringing native content from partners on board - would have thought Twitter would do the same with Vine.
- corobo 10y ago
  I don't know what snapchat are doing these days, my friend circle stopped using it a while back. I mean it's probably relevant if it's all still images/videos that delete themselves. How do they go about their adverts for the uninitiated?
  - kristianc 10y ago
    They have a section called 'Discover' where they've invited BuzzFeed, Cosmo, Sky News to produce native content for them that links to their web properties. They're consumed as part of the regular Snapchat experience and an extension of the Snapchat 'Stories' idea.

edwinnathaniel 10y ago

Vine "stars" are moving to Snapchat, they'll bring their viewers as well.

draw_down 10y ago

They're not killing the website. At least not yet.

cgusto 10y ago

I think this is the wrong way to look at Vine's impact. If you search Youtube for monthly Vine compilations (ie Oct 2016 Vines) these videos have millions of views - enough to make some of these Vine stars into minor celebrities (look up King Bach). Vine pretty much started the short form video craze. Twitter missed the opportunity to make it so people visited the Vine app to view these compilations, which would have maybe encouraged the creators to only make content for Vine. They dropped the ball, and now the top creators all use their competitors.