Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz;

Author:Taylor Lorenz;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

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In the months that followed, the 1600 Viners all but ceased publishing original content to the app. Instead, they posted video after video encouraging fans to follow them on Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Musical.ly, and Facebook.

Still, Vine pursued a last-ditch effort to retain its talent. In February 2016, the company flew a handful of popular Viners to the company’s London office. The plan was to help them network and collaborate with UK creators. Vine staff were going to put on a seminar about how to create the most engaging content. The company put the creators up in a posh SoHo hotel, while Gruger and others from Vine’s U.S. office shepherded the Viners around town. The trip seemed to go well, and the creators were again posting original content to their Vine pages.

But the morning they were set to depart for London’s Heathrow Airport, Gruger came down to the hotel lobby and saw the creators huddled together around their phones, chatting excitedly. Instagram had just launched a hub on its “Explore” tab with a little video carousel highlighting creators’ Instagram profiles and videos. Every person featured in Instagram’s creator highlight section was in the hotel lobby.

Instead of rising to the top, mid-level Viners, encouraged to defect by the 1600 Vine crowd, were fleeing the platform.

Staff left too. Toff departed the company in January 2016, and the app flailed without a leader. Others stepped into temporary leadership roles, but it felt to employees like a ship taking on water with too many holes to plug.

Hannah Donovan, a seasoned product executive who had worked at Last.fm and MTV, took over as the platform’s new general manager in June 2016. Her mandate from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was to bring innovation back to Vine’s creation tools. Vine’s woes had bred deep resentment among staff and toward their own parent company, which they felt had fumbled Vine from the start. In early September 2016, Donovan was called into a seemingly mundane financial planning meeting for Twitter, the premise for which was to discuss the first-quarter budget for 2017. Midway through, someone mentioned that Donovan’s head count at Vine would be frozen. Alarm bells went off in her head. Someone said, “Oh, she doesn’t know yet.” Donovan wasn’t sure what was going on.

After the meeting she immediately reached out to Dorsey, who said they needed to talk. Back at her hotel room in San Francisco, she threw up. She knew what was about to happen.

Twitter as a whole was in a perilous spot throughout 2016, in part due to the broader industry’s pivot to video. The app was hemorrhaging users, and its stock was cratering. Advertising revenue was flagging, and the media narrative was that the company was facing troubled times. “Twitter’s growth has stagnated, and it’s nowhere close to turning a profit,” CNN declared. The company’s product, engineering, media, and HR directors had all left the company by mid-2016.

Donovan knew all of this, so when Dorsey told her that Vine would be shuttering, she was shocked but not wholly surprised.

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