Twitter will shut down its 6-second video service, Vine

Twitter is shutting down Vine, the six-second video service, it announced in a blog post on Thursday.

Vine launched in January 2013 and was Twitter’s early foray into digital video. When Vine debuted, mobile video wasn’t really a thing. YouTube’s audience was mostly on desktop, Snapchat was only a messaging app, Facebook’s autoplay video product was only a month old and Instagram was only for photos.

Things have changed.

As Facebook’s, Snapchat’s and Instagram’s video audiences grew, Vine’s homegrown stars, like King Bach, Lele Pons, Logan Paul and Amanda Cerny, branched out to those platforms, as well as YouTube. And as audiences’ attentions steered more toward Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube and less toward Vine, so did advertisers’ investments. The rise of Vine’s rivals — as well as a sibling rival in Twitter’s own native video product rolled out in January 2015 — has now led Twitter to cut off Vine.

Vine’s shutdown will happen at some point “in the coming months,” according to the service’s blog post. Until then, people will still be able to check out the videos on Vine, download the ones they posted to the service and maybe upload them to one of the other mobile video platforms, perhaps even Twitter’s.

Vine was the only place for this kind of thing. Still my favorite Vine of all time https://t.co/2zMvhouuNl

— Tim Peterson (@petersontee) October 27, 2016

Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and now Twitter need to make homes for these kinds of videos https://t.co/pxgL4YSlFo

— Tim Peterson (@petersontee) October 27, 2016

And these https://t.co/Q5yrVFvpni

— Tim Peterson (@petersontee) October 27, 2016

And these https://t.co/V9tydg05Os

— Tim Peterson (@petersontee) October 27, 2016

And these https://t.co/bFf7H5ETma

— Tim Peterson (@petersontee) October 27, 2016

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat's ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar's attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon's ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking's rise; and documented digital video's biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed's branded video production process and Snapchat Discover's ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands' early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo's and Google's search designs and examine the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.