What if Vine came back from the dead to compete with all of today’s new video creation platforms? Elon Musk, new boss of Twitter, did not rule out the idea.
Like a huge open-air place for debate, Elon Musk’s Twitter account has become in recent days the complaints office for millions of users and the suggestion box for the new Twitter boss.
The multimillionaire chained announcements concerning possible new functions on the platform, generally always in response to requests from Internet users. Elon Musk has already discussed the possible increase in the character limit for tweets. He also announced the creation of a content moderation council. And the new boss of Twitter does not intend to stop there, with the possible return of the mythical Vine.
A widely reported survey
It is once again thanks to a tweet that Elon Musk has relaunched his media machine and speculation about the news to come on his latest acquisition. And this time around, the richest man in the world used Twitter’s “Poll” function to do his market research.
His poll question couldn’t be simpler: “Bring Vine back?”, with two possible answers, “yes” or “no”. In just a few hours, the poll has already collected more than two million votes, taking advantage of the account’s hundred million subscribers. For the moment, the “yes” wins by far, with 70% of the votes.
Vine, disappeared from the radar for 6 years
Officially closed in 2016 after 4 years of existence, Vine could thus make a comeback. The application created at the time by Twitter made it possible to host short six-second videos. This short format had brought out many content creators.
In just a few months of existence, Vine claimed 40 million users worldwide. This seems tiny today compared to the billion users of TikTok. But the platform had managed to make a name for itself, and still remains today a reference for short format videos. Many Vine video compilations now accumulate hundreds of millions of views on Youtube.
Fall to get up better?
Vine, however, had failed to become profitable. The video platform did not have a monetization service possible for regular content creators, which severely hampered its growth. The service had thus become a financial burden for its parent company Twitter. Vine reportedly cost the American company around $10 million a month.
The increased competition from other giants in the sector also logically caused Vine’s downfall. Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube and Facebook have indeed multiplied offers similar to Vine during its period of existence. And with Tiktok, Youtube’s “shorts” but also Instagram’s Reels, it’s hard to imagine how Vine could make a successful comeback today, if it ever took place.
Under his Twitter poll, Elon Musk posed another question: “What could we do to make this better than TikTok?”. Several thousand responses followed one another, enough to give new avenues of work for the boss of Twitter. What also reinforce its attraction for the participative direction, at least only with its Net surfers.