Twitter is Shutting Down Its Video App Vine (recode.net)

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Twitter is Shutting Down Its Video App Vine (recode.net)

Posted by msmash on Thursday October 27, 2016 @06:55AM from the killing-things dept.

Twitter's plan to refocus on its core business consists of laying off 9 percent of its staff, and also killing off Vine. The company announced today that it will shut down Vine's video app in the coming months. From a Recode report: Vine has been struggling for some time, so Thursday's move is surprising but not unbelievable. The app was never a revenue driver for the company, and it was no longer growing. Many of its top executives left over the spring and early summer. What's interesting is that Twitter is shutting the app down instead of trying to sell it off. Or perhaps it did try and simply couldn't find a buyer (like a buyer for itself). Either way, Vine will soon shut down. The company says that users will be able to download their Vine videos before that happens, but there has been no specific timetable announced. Vine general manager Hannah Davis, who just joined the company this spring, will stay on to oversee the transition, according to a spokesperson.

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"The app was never a revenue driver..." by Zontar+The+Mindless · 2016-10-27 06:57 · Score: 5, Funny

Unlike Twitter itself, which has been making money hand over fist.
Oh, wait--

--
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
1. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by squiggleslash · 2016-10-27 07:02 · Score: 1
  
  Well, clearly they'd be making money hand over fist if it wasn't for Vine ;-)
  Must admit I'm baffled by the uproar on Twitter. It was never that popular a service, and it sucked when your timelines were stuffed by autoplaying Vines, as they were when the service started and it was still novel.
  
  --
  You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
2. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by perpenso · 2016-10-27 07:06 · Score: 1
  
  Unlike Twitter itself, which has been making money hand over fist.
  Twitter can be sold and make its investors money. Perhaps not as much as they dreamed of but still a profit.
3. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by Dutch+Gun · 2016-10-27 07:11 · Score: 1
  
  Must admit I'm baffled by the uproar on Twitter.
  Twitter is pretty good at brewing tempests in teapots. Surely it's not all that surprising.
  
  --
  Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
4. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 07:51 · Score: 0
  
  Unlike Twitter itself, which has been making money hand over fist.
  Oh, wait--
  Twitter generates hundreds of millions in revenue.
5. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by Curunir_wolf · 2016-10-27 07:51 · Score: 1
  
  Well the stock is a bargain right now - the market hasn't reacted to this or the layoff news. It's still down even after a better-than-expected earnings report. I'm picking up some shares right now!
  
  --
  "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
  --- Jerry Garcia
6. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by 110010001000 · 2016-10-27 07:55 · Score: 1
  
  The market knows about news before you do. There is a reason it is a "bargain".
7. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 08:11 · Score: 0
  
  Apps that app other apps get apped! Apps!
8. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by T.E.D. · 2016-10-27 08:17 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Unlike Twitter itself, which has been making money ...
  One of the first steps in protecting yourself from finance weasels is to learn what their words mean. In particular, "revenue" and "profit" are two very different things. For example, Twitter's numbers from last quarter show their revenue from the quarter was over $600 million. Perhaps not Google numbers, but not a lot of companies earn that much in a single quarter. However, their profit was about -$100 million. So of course the sensible thing here would be to get rid of some of the things that are costing more than they are making. If Vine has lots of folks working on it, and isn't in fact pulling in a lot of revenue (raw $), then yes it makes perfect sense for a bean-counter to want to get rid of it.
9. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by myNameIsNotImportant · 2016-10-27 08:24 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  the difference between revenue and profit has absolutely nothing to do with being a "finance weasel". it is financial jargon, and a basic one at that.
  do you really mean to imply that failing to understand the distinction between a monitor and a CPU is protecting yourself from IT weasel-words?
10. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by yuriklastalov · 2016-10-27 08:48 · Score: 1
  
  It's OK, http://reddit.com/r/wallstreet... has his back.
11. Re: "The app was never a revenue driver..." by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 08:49 · Score: 0
  
  it would help
12. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by youngone · 2016-10-27 09:11 · Score: 1
  
  If Rupert Murdoch has forgotten about MySpace they might flog it off to him.
  Judging by the decisions he makes in his private life, he might be keen.
13. Re: "The app was never a revenue driver..." by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 09:32 · Score: 0
  
  Never understood why Vines didn't have a proper volume control. Scroll through Timeline, get blasted with rock music on a cat video, scream "Da fuq!!!!??" and quickly mute audio. Grrrrr.
14. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by rudy_wayne · 2016-10-27 10:06 · Score: 1
  
  Well, that was $30 Million well spent.
15. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 10:07 · Score: 0
  
  Unlike Twitter itself, which has been making money hand over fist.
  Twitter can be sold and make its investors money. Perhaps not as much as they dreamed of but still a profit.
  Twitter has never generated any profit and loses at least $100 Million every year. The fact that it's stock price is anything other than zero proves what a scam the stock market is.
16. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by perpenso · 2016-10-27 12:20 · Score: 1
  
  Twitter has never generated any profit and loses at least $100 Million every year.
  Some products are not revenue generators themselves, they are complementary products that support something else that generates revenue. Or there is a hybrid model where it generates some revenue and also supports some other product that also generates revenue. It all depends on the buyer, and a buyer is probably not going to follow the current failed model you are referring to.
17. Re: "The app was never a revenue driver..." by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 12:39 · Score: 0
  
  Or some things are steaming piles of over-hyped shit that lose themselves in social justice agendas, then crash and burn because they pandered to a small vocal minority.
  Same thing though, right?
18. Re: "The app was never a revenue driver..." by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 12:41 · Score: 0
  
  The only people talking about buying twitter right now are people who stupidly own Twitter already, Twitter employees, and smug motherfuckers like me who made three years of salary by shorting it.
19. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by shortscruffydave · 2016-10-27 23:40 · Score: 1
  
  Some products are not revenue generators themselves, they are complementary products that support something else that generates revenue.
  True, but I'm struggling to identify revenue-generating something else that Twitter is complementing.
20. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by shortscruffydave · 2016-10-27 23:43 · Score: 1
  
  The only way I see of turning $600M revenue into a $100M loss is to spend $700M...what the actual f*** is there that costs that amount of money?
21. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by T.E.D. · 2016-10-28 03:12 · Score: 2
  
  The only way I see of turning $600M revenue into a $100M loss is to spend $700M...what the actual f*** is there that costs that amount of money?
  For reference, they have 3,860 employees, according to their website. Generously assuming average costs of $200,000 yearly each (salary, benefits, health care, etc), that would chew up a bit under $200M in labor costs for the quarter. So there's still half a billion in non-labor expenses there.
22. Re:"The app was never a revenue driver..." by perpenso · 2016-10-28 05:06 · Score: 1
  
  Some products are not revenue generators themselves, they are complementary products that support something else that generates revenue.
  True, but I'm struggling to identify revenue-generating something else that Twitter is complementing.
  Possibly some news company? Its a fast way to pump out headlines, supply a link to the article on your site?
Funny unicode bug by istartedi · 2016-10-27 07:01 · Score: 0

On my machine, "couldn't" is rendering as "couldna-hat(TM)t" where "a-hat" is the a with the little hat mark over it. It's probably a unicide bug, but it's as if you're saying that "couldn't find a buyer" is a trademarked phrase, which it kind of is.

--
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
1. Re:Funny unicode bug by Allicorn · 2016-10-27 07:31 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  "Unicide" : when a website kills its own usability by failing to specify its character set correctly.
  
  --
  OMG!!! Ponies!!!
2. Re:Funny unicode bug by yuriklastalov · 2016-10-27 08:52 · Score: 0
  
  More like Windows is fucking retarded and that's what the stupid "smart apostrophe" looks like when going from Windows-1252 to whatever useless encoding Slashdot uses.
  Smart quotes are a scourge, only typography weenies give a shit. ASCII ' and " should be enough for everybody.
3. Re:Funny unicode bug by Zontar+The+Mindless · 2016-10-27 10:16 · Score: 1
  
  ...whatever useless encoding Slashdot uses...
  Hmmmmmm.....
  
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
  
  --
  Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
4. Re:Funny unicode bug by istartedi · 2016-10-27 11:14 · Score: 1
  
  I don't know what the path is that leads to the error, but FWIW this was Firefox on Windows. Whenever I see screwed up stuff like that, I usually assume they are on a Mac; but I have no idea if that's the most common cause or not.
  In any event, we got their attention and it's fixed!
  
  --
  For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Won't Someone Think of The Children?! by RumGunner · 2016-10-27 07:06 · Score: 1

Where are we going to get our "Best of Vine" Youtube Compilations now?!
Oh, wait--
Never liked Vine by jmhysong · 2016-10-27 07:06 · Score: 1

It seemed to me that Vine was just a bunch of people screwing around trying to be funny and failing.
1. Re:Never liked Vine by RumGunner · 2016-10-27 07:08 · Score: 1
  
  Kind of like SNL in the late-2000s...
2. Re:Never liked Vine by psyclone · 2016-10-27 07:10 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  And nothing of value was lost.
3. Re:Never liked Vine by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 07:24 · Score: 0
  
  Agreed. Vine was a video fad that is finally meeting it's end.
4. Re:Never liked Vine by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 08:58 · Score: 0
  
  I say this as someone who likes Twitter, and thinks that 140 characters is fine and doesn't need increasing... but seriously, what was Vine about? Did anyone actually use it?
  I can probably count the number of Vine videos I've seen on one hand, and none struck me as remotely creative/funny/useful/interesting. It just seemed like a novelty, or maybe someone's idea of a parody of "microblogging".
5. Re:Never liked Vine by Daetrin · 2016-10-27 09:05 · Score: 1
  
  I've seen a number of cute Vines of cats. I'll miss those, but that about it?
  
  --
  This Space Intentionally Left Blank
6. Re:Never liked Vine by jimmifett · 2016-10-27 09:46 · Score: 1
  
  You mean late 80s to the present. SNL hasn't been entertaining in DECADES.
7. Re:Never liked Vine by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 11:13 · Score: 0
  
  You mean late 80s to the present. SNL hasn't been entertaining in DECADES.
  Nope. Go farther back than that. Like the late 70s and very early 80s.
  SNL was funny when it originally came to TV with the original cast, a true ensemble that really functioned like a group.
  After the various cast changes over the years, the "chemistry" of the SNL ensemble never really coalesced into a unified group.
  Said another way, after the original cast started to break away in their indivisdual paths to fame & fortune, the SNL ensemble evolved into a bunch of individual contributors that tried to be funny as a group ... and they have failed on an EPIC level.
8. Re:Never liked Vine by interkin3tic · 2016-10-27 11:38 · Score: 1
  
  I've found funny people on vine. It took some digging though, which might be part of why it failed to take off. As far as only trying for comedy, yeah, five seconds isn't enough time to do much more than a simple gag.
  
  Sometimes constraints on stuff people make up ends up working better. Scientific research presentations that are 15 minutes to half an hour are usually the good talks. Presentations where the researcher is allowed to blabber on and on about their snail penis research which they think is the most important human endeavor ever? Even if I liked snail penis research, it would be unbearable. At the other end of seriousness, webcomics that limit themselves to 3 panels seem to be better for longer than the ones that wank off about "infinite canvas."
  
  So I thought vine might be interesting because of that. And there are some really creative, clever, funny vine videos. Certainly I've found better stuff there than youtube. Seems like every fucking youtube video on anything of interest to me has about half a minute of pointless logos, followed by minutes of introduction that are redundant with the title. There isn't any of that in vine for obvious reasons, it's all content.
  
  I think five seconds may have just been too constrained. Ten seconds might have worked. Maybe 30 seconds. I dunno. But I think there would have been some viable and interesting video service that could have cut a lot of crap found in youtube.
Twitter is Shutting Down by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 07:09 · Score: 0

Yessss, finally... now go away.
1. Re:Twitter is Shutting Down by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 07:27 · Score: 0
  
  They won't shut twitter down. It still makes money.... Allegedly.
2. Re:Twitter is Shutting Down by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 09:26 · Score: 0
  
  How exactly is "losing money hand over fist" making money?????
Bye Bye Kira (nt) by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 07:27 · Score: 0

No text
I prefer Twitter... by Oswald+McWeany · 2016-10-27 07:27 · Score: 3, Interesting

Of the various antisocial networks, I prefer Twitter to things like Facebook.
Twitter let's you be anonymous. Twitter doesn't track you quite as closely. (I'm sure they still do, but I don't see Twitter getting blocked on my browser for tracking). Twitter doesn't introduce new privacy effacing features and turn them on by default. Twitter doesn't let other people upload your picture and tag it if you're not a member.
Twitter actually serves a purpose other than spreading your vanity. It's a great source to find out "happening now" news and information (understanding much of it is flawed). Twitter connects the world instead of small networks.
Twitter is fairly benign. I'd much rather it survive and facebook die. Shame it is so unprofitable.

--
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
1. Re:I prefer Twitter... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 07:31 · Score: 0
  
  Thanks for sharing grandpa!
2. Re:I prefer Twitter... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 07:40 · Score: 0
  
  Twitter let's you be anonymous
  Ever tried to tweet anonymously?
  Even after confirming your email, passing initial waiting/cooloff period, jumping through hoops, etc. if Twitter does not *really* like your account profile your "tweet" is only visible to yourself when you are logged in. Public search results and other users cannot see it (with no indicator you are in untrusted/silenced ghost-status).
3. Re:I prefer Twitter... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 07:57 · Score: 0
  
  Twitter is extremely bloated and clunky for what it's supposed to do, you're trying to read some timeline and the continuous scrolling thing randomly brings you back up at the beginning.
  It might have been good 5 years ago
4. Re:I prefer Twitter... by tattood · 2016-10-27 08:18 · Score: 2
  
  Twitter actually serves a purpose other than spreading your vanity. It's a great source to find out "happening now" news and information (understanding much of it is flawed)
  I beg to differ. Twitter is superb at showing people's vanity. Why do you think that almost every celebrity has a Twitter account? Do people really need to know what Justin Bieber and Beyonce are up to at any moment? No, but millions of people care about what celebrities are doing, and the celebrities love knowing that millions of people care about what they are doing. Twitter is ego stroking at its finest.
  
  --
  WTB [sig], PST!!!
5. Re: I prefer Twitter... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 16:51 · Score: 0
  
  Twitter requires a phone number for accounts
6. Re: I prefer Twitter... by Oswald+McWeany · 2016-10-27 23:53 · Score: 1
  
  I must have signed up before that happened. I most certainly have never given Twitter my phone number.
  
  --
  "That's the way to do it" - Punch
7. Re: I prefer Twitter... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-28 01:55 · Score: 0
  
  No it doesn't.
  It asks for one, and they'd prefer you add one for password resets and login verification, but it's not required.
8. Re: I prefer Twitter... by meta-monkey · 2016-10-28 03:26 · Score: 1
  
  Depends on your market. In most developed nations you need to give it a phone number. If you want an account without a phone number attached, set your tor exit node to India and make an account from there.
  
  --
  We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Sell it off, don't axe it by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 07:27 · Score: 0

Some of the most creative content I've seen in ages has been on Vine
1. Re:Sell it off, don't axe it by DidgetMaster · 2016-10-27 07:33 · Score: 1
  
  Make them a great offer and I am sure they will let you try to keep it alive. The fact that it is losing money just might be a problem for other potential buyers.
2. Re:Sell it off, don't axe it by imidan · 2016-10-27 07:46 · Score: 1
  
  I've looked at a lot more vines than tweets, but that's not saying much. Still, I'm a little surprised that this is what they choose to cut. It seems like the most promising non-essential feature of twitter.
3. Re:Sell it off, don't axe it by 110010001000 · 2016-10-27 07:48 · Score: 1
  
  Obviously you haven't been looking very hard, millenial.
I guess you could say... by Chris+Mattern · 2016-10-27 07:33 · Score: 2

...it's dying on the Vine.
YEEEAAAH!!!
1. Re:I guess you could say... by darkain · 2016-10-27 07:50 · Score: 1
  
  Never leave home without it! (warning: flash, and sometimes loads slowly) http://cow.org/csi/
But They're Keeping What's Critical by Anonymous Coward · 2016-10-27 08:12 · Score: 0

But they're keeping the Committee of Public Safety