6. VIVs (Very Important Viners)
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What challenges was Vine facing in its decline?
This is a Global Player original podcast. Last time on Vine, six seconds that changed the world. It's code red. To protect morale, the digital board displaying daily user stats that's up in Vine HQ had quietly been taken down. Vine is spiraling. Of course, none of this is helped by Instagram's rival push into video, all three of the app's founders leaving in quick succession, growing discontent from Vine's top creators, a general disregard of the app by its own parent company, Twitter, who has, by the way, just undergone a brutal series of layoffs. But aside from all that, yeah, things are going great. Why do you ask? Let's discuss this dilemma, right? Because the 1600 Viners are now completely dominating the platform. And is that necessarily a problem? Because they're attracting huge numbers of viewers, huge numbers of loops, as they said on Vine. And on the surface, at least, you would go, OK, well, happy Vine users equals happy Vine, right? But not really, right?
How did Vine creators feel about the content on the platform?
No, there were kind of two problems with this. For a lot of the Vine staff, they actively disliked the content that was being produced. And it's not just a matter of different taste in comedy. They would have liked something more highbrow. There were real concerns that there was content that was quite racist, quite misogynistic. They didn't want this stuff there. And the problem was because these videos were now accounting for such a big proportion of Vine usage, they kind of felt held hostage. They would have liked to have got rid of them in the way the platforms would now. But they felt like, well, if we get rid of this, then the creator will be annoyed and we'll go and they'll take all of these users with them.
They were kind of load bearing, weren't they? It was like, we don't like this incredibly popular section of the app. It's like when a doctor's like, we have to leave the bullet in or it will do more damage.
Yeah.
How can you fix the platform if removing this group will kill the platform?
And then the other problem is, yeah, sure, they are accounting for a huge proportion of the user base, but they're also now dominating it such a way that nothing else can grow. And so even if their proportion is huge, that doesn't make up for all the potential users that you've just lost because everything else has kind of died.
They have all the views, but mainly because they've got these revine-for-revine systems... You've got great strategy. You know, these are very successful people in their own right. I don't want to put them down too much, but they have strategized their way to the top.
Yeah. In the meantime, it means the platform has become this sort of single, quite homogenous thing. They've narrowed it to one kind of comedy and there's no space for the rest of the comedy to grow. Now, the dilemma that Karen has is how do we change that without removing the bullet and bleeding out?
Karen instantly recognized something that had been long overlooked at Vine HQ. Just because content from top creators was characteristically immature, that didn't mean they shouldn't be taken seriously.
You know, everybody just waves them off like, oh, how great and easy it must be to just take a video of yourself in an outfit and make millions of dollars. There's so much that goes into understanding how to be on top. They not only have to have a good grasp of the art of content creation, but most of them are very fluent in the science. of algorithms and this is why i find it laughable that influencers are so dismissed in entertainment and captivating eyeballs and audiences it's not an easy thing to not only excel at but then to stay at the top of the game because algorithms are constantly changing apps are constantly changing the way they do things in ways that the staff didn't really even understand but the creators
They knew what their top looped vine was. They knew what their average loops were. They had all of the statistics down. And there was also an app called RankZoo, which was like their Bible. And they would go every day to see where they ranked in the system.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What challenges was Vine facing in its decline?
0:02–1:03
2
How did Vine creators feel about the content on the platform?
1:03–7:06
3
What strategy did Karyn implement to save Vine?
7:06–7:54
4
How did Karyn categorize Vine creators?
7:54–10:13
5
What were the major changes in Vine's approach to creators?
10:13–12:34
6
How did Vine's monetization issues affect creators?
12:34–16:04
7
What was the significance of Karen's arrival at Vine?
16:04–19:56
8
What were the implications of extending Vine's video length?
19:56–36:52