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Twitter is currently undergoing some major changes. After years of struggling with monetizing over 300 million monthly active users and not being able to attract new ones, the company decided on a new approach – cutting costs and streamlining operations. First order of business is conducting significant job cuts as Twitter just announced it’s laying off approximately 9% of its global workforce which amounts to around 350 people. Second order of business? Shutting down Vine.
Vine has been and still is one of the most popular online video services on the Internet. About a year ago, Twitter boasted that Vines are watched by 200 million people each month. Vine’s success can be attributed to a combination of its unique posting system which only allows videos of up to 6 seconds in duration and the fact that you can use the service even without a dedicated app. When Twitter announced that it was buying Vine back in 2012, that decision made a lot of sense. The social network may have had some identity issues in recent years, but one thing it consistently stuck to was the strict character limit imposed on Tweets. Because of that, it seemed logical that a microblogging platform purchases a promising video service with a comparable philosophy. Unfortunately for Vine, that didn’t pan out in the end. Twitter didn’t invest a lot in supporting Vine which is still remarkably similar to the original product which officially launched in 2013. To make matters worse, Vine was never really deeply integrated into Twitter, and when you couple that with the fact that Twitter was apparently struggling to monetize it, discontinuation does seem inevitable.
Backstory aside, the co-founder of Vine Rus Yusupov apparently isn’t thrilled with recent developments. In a short Tweet sent yesterday, Rus exclaimed: “don’t sell your company!” As TechCrunch reports, Yusupov wasn’t aware of Twitter’s decision to shut down the service he sold in late 2012 for a reported figure of $30 million. Back then, the Internet entrepreneur stayed on as the Creative Director of Vine until he was laid off by Twitter in October of 2015. While he didn’t make any additional comments on Twitter’s announcement, Yusupov’s message can most likely be interpreted as “lesson learned.”