‘Extremely Online’: Inside the secret meeting that put Vine on the ropes

Vine’s spectacular rise and fall showed the power of online creators. Its demise offers crucial lessons for platforms trying to engage with power users — and a deeper understanding of who ultimately controls a social product.

Founded in June 2012 in New York by three tech entrepreneurs, Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll, Vine was the first mainstream mobile video social platform. The app allowed amateurs to create their own mini masterpieces on their phones with easy-to-use editing tools. And its six-second cap on video length let users share short, unfiltered moments from their lives.

Vine’s promise was so enticing that in October 2012, several months before the app’s planned launch, Twitter bought it for a reported $30 million. It made sense. Vine’s short video posts were a natural complement to Twitter’s short text and image posts. What was a Vine clip if not a video tweet?

Within just a few months of launching, the Vine platform began to cement itself in popular culture. But its prominence came not from users posting artful clips of daily life, as the founders had envisioned, but from an emerging cadre of creative young millennials who used it to share funny stunts and pranks. Vine seemed to mint new memes by the minute. Digital media sites aggregated viral content from the platform, repackaging Vines into viral roundups and internet explainers. Vine even reached as far as the White House, which used it frequently to document life at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

As the app grew, more young people leveraged it to catapult themselves to fame. They amassed millions of followers, hosted meetups that shut down malls and parks, and kicked off trends that transformed culture.

All of this was increasingly profitable. But the one place they couldn’t make money was Vine itself. While YouTube had rolled out its revenue sharing Partner Program back in 2007, Vine was introduced without any monetization tools or internal company support teams for creators.

So Vine stars circumvented Vine and began doing sponsored content deals directly with brands. By 2014, advertisers were paying talent around $3 to $5 for every thousand followers, according to Vine creators. A Vine star with 1 million followers could earn $5,000 for posting a sponsored Vine to their feed. Recode reported that former waiter-turned-Vine-star Matt Cutshall, who had (only) 323,000 followers, was making close to $75,000 a year doing advertisements for brands including Gap.

An upcoming series from The Washington Post examining the industry of online influence and its impact on American culture, media and power.

Soon, Vine stars were working with agents and managers. To transition from internet novelty to lasting stardom, they went to Hollywood — literally. They moved into a Los Angeles apartment building on a street with their name on it. The address: 1600 Vine.

The apartment complex became the nexus of the Vine world. By mid-2015, nearly 20 of the app’s biggest creators lived in the complex. “It felt like a bunch of dorms although we were young, stupid and rich,” said Rudy Mancuso, a former Vine creator. “It fulfilled the college experience I didn’t have. It was the college experience on steroids.”

While life was chaotic at 1600 Vine, there was a rhythm. Each day, creators woke up around 10 a.m., sometimes hung over. They’d check Rankzoo, a platform that offered regularly updated rankings of Viners based on a variety of metrics. After breakfast, creators would head down to the pool to strategize about what to post that day. They’d toss out skit ideas and punchlines. They all took turns acting in one another’s videos or holding the phone to shoot. It was like an internet-driven theater company. “It was so easy to film, I could knock on Amanda [Cerny] or Logan [Paul]’s door and shoot a video,” said Andrew Bachelor, one of the most popular Vine creators of the time.

Once they had the day’s content planned, the 1600 Viners discussed distribution. The top Vine stars practically controlled what was popular on the app. By using the “revine” feature, which allowed you to repost someone else’s Vine to your followers, the most-followed users could dominate the app’s Popular page. (Top Viners even found an additional revenue stream by charging up-and-coming creators for revines.) This dynamic didn’t emerge on platforms like YouTube and Instagram at the time because there was no native reshare tool. Vine was highly vulnerable to monopolization by its top creators.

The creators would work out who would share each video, as well as when each piece of content would be shared for maximum impact. Bachelor was growing the fastest, gaining nearly 100,000 followers a day, so he often took the lead. Making an appearance in one of his videos could be a major break, resulting in thousands of new followers.

The creators at 1600 Vine weren’t just gaming the app’s ranking algorithm; they were pushing the boundaries of the app itself. Initially, Vine removed any content that appeared to be created outside the app. But when Marcus Johns, a top creator on the app, celebrated his 1-million-follower milestone by posting a video that was clearly edited on a third-party app, the company didn’t remove it. Other creators saw this and began posting pre-edited content to their feeds as well, adding sound effects or funny visual details to make their content pop.

Vine’s stance toward its biggest creators was ambivalent at best and hostile at worst.

“The company’s relationship with creators was nonexistent,” said Jeremy Cabalona, Vine’s former community manager. “I would tweet at them, tag them and share their work, but the overall policy from the founders was to ignore them.”

Vine leaders resented that these creators had taken over their network and were using the app to publish content they didn’t intend for it. “They were like, ‘We don’t like this. This is not what Vine is for,’” said Cabalona. “It wasn’t meant to be a performance platform or to get famous. It was to capture your life moments.”

Flare-ups between the company and its biggest creators were common, over even the smallest features. For instance, when Vine introduced web profiles and vanity URLs — short, easy-to-remember links that allowed users to share their Vine profiles outside the app — top Viners said they received no advance notice of the feature’s rollout. Nash Grier, one of the app’s biggest stars, was minutes too late when the URLs launched. A random user seized his URL, vine.co/nashgrier.

Frustrated, Grier contacted the company to ask for help in obtaining his username. It would have been simple enough to fix, said Cabalona, and he asked the founders to help Grier out. But Kroll, who died in 2018, scoffed at the request. “Colin was like, ‘He doesn’t need it. Let it go,’” Cabalona recalled. “It was a pretty explicit no from Colin.” Grier claimed an alternative handle, but it caused unnecessary confusion and harmed his search discoverability on the platform for years.

Not long after, Grier and the 1600 Viners realized that the company was silently barring some of their clips from trending. Some of their most viral videos were being manually removed from the app’s Popular page. “[Vine stars] would reach out to me all day and be like, ‘You’re blocking us. We know it,’” said Cabalona.

They were right. The co-founders were curating what trended on the site. If a Vine star was rising on the app’s Popular page with content the co-founders didn’t approve of, such as silly skits filmed by the 1600 Vine pool, the executives would have it pulled. “Someone would say, ‘This kid is trending. Knock him off,’” Cabalona said. Making matters worse, Cabalona and other Vine staffers weren’t allowed to acknowledge the practice externally, which eroded trust between creators and the app.

The conflict erupted at VidCon 2014, a convention for online creators in Anaheim, Calif., when a group of Vine creators cornered Cabalona and a colleague, verbally heckled them and berated them over the platform’s lack of support. The Vine staffers fled the contentious exchange, fearing physical assault.

The situation was unsustainable. After a series of executive departures, Jason Toff, a product manager at YouTube, joined Vine as head of product and brought in a new hire to formalize relationships with creators. Karyn Spencer had previously run social media for high-profile celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, and built him into one of the most followed accounts on Twitter. She had also worked on the monetization side at the Audience, an influencer marketing firm, where she negotiated brand deals with many Viners. At Vine, her job was to be a peacemaker, building a bridge between the most popular users on the app and the company.

Spencer started in September 2015 with a lot of optimism but soon grasped the magnitude of the task before her. “Three weeks into my employment they called me in and shut the door and were like, ‘The reason you’re here is because we’re in code red,’” Spencer said.

Spencer knew that cultivating top Viners was crucial to the company’s survival. But she and many others were conflicted about the creators at 1600 Vine. “They built this structure of power that kept them all at the top,” she said. This collusion made it difficult for users to discover new talent, and for Vine to nurture that talent.

This monopoly, in Vine’s eyes, was especially problematic because the content produced at 1600 Vine was not what the company wanted to promote. The Viners’ jokes were often juvenile at best, and frequently misogynistic, homophobic or racist. “It was a lot of slapping women on the ass and racially fueled jokes,” Spencer said. “It was the lowest common denominator of comedy.”

In one Vine, for instance, Bachelor tells a group of men and women that he would hold the door to the elevator if they perform a sexual act. The group laughs, enters the elevator, the door closes. And Bach says: “I was serious, though.” He then begins to hit the women and men. In the final scene, he emerges from the elevator — now strewn with their half-dressed bodies — zipping up his fly. The punchline was that he sexually assaulted them. And this was the most popular Viner.

Videos like Bachelor’s seemed to support Vine’s long-standing efforts to remove content that it found offensive. But because the platform was dominated by a single cohabiting clique, the company had nowhere to turn. If it pulled Bachelor’s video, would he defect to another platform? Would all of 1600 Vine defect in solidarity?

It was a dilemma that would plague social media platforms for years to come: What do you do when your most popular creators behave badly?

These questions were lurking in the back of Spencer’s mind when she ventured to 1600 Vine for a meeting called by nearly 20 of the app’s biggest stars in the fall of 2015. With her were Cabalona and William Gruger, a content strategist who had joined the company from Billboard to help Vine develop closer relationships with the music industry.

When they arrived, Johns, the leader of the meeting, ushered them into a conference room where the creators sat around a table. The Vine staffers were eager to hear what they could do to make the creators happy. By then, Vine usage was fading as the app faced increased competition from YouTube, which offered better ways to monetize content, and Instagram, which was leaning hard into short-form video and absorbing large swaths of Vine’s user base.

But this was no traditional business meeting. According to multiple people present, it morphed instead into a therapy session. Creators vented about feeling neglected. Each one delivered a monologue about everything they’d achieved thanks to the app, such as buying a family member a car or a house, or selling a pilot to a major TV network. “But,” one Viner said bitterly, in a sentiment echoed by others, “you people are the first people I have ever met that work at Vine.”

Johns, who declined to comment on the episode, noted that the streets of Los Angeles were lined with massive billboards featuring YouTube stars. “Why can’t we be that for you guys?” he asked angrily. Where was their recognition? Twitter simply did not care about creators the way YouTube did, he charged. And no one in the room, including the Vine employees, knew how to change the parent company’s core attitudes.

Creators weren’t just angry about monetization; they were frustrated that the app seemed to have no interest in building features that catered to power users. For instance, the Viners felt that Vine and its parent company were not doing enough to curb the brutal and overwhelming abuse and harassment directed at top creators, especially women. They demanded that Vine institute comment filtering, blocking, and muting features, and more robust analytics.

Spencer attempted to quell the crowd, but the creators weren’t interested in lip service. They knew how much it would hurt the app if they all stopped posting. Johns explained that they had prepared a list of demands.

The primary demand was $1 million a year for three Vines every week.

Spencer and her colleagues headed back to New York to present the creators’ requests to Twitter. At the time, she was cautiously optimistic. A million dollars for 19 or so creators in exchange for three posts a week might, she said, “be the stopgap we need to get us to the next place.”

But a few days later, a formal letter arrived spelling out the creators’ terms. Spencer was aghast. The 1600 Vine group didn’t want $1 million annually for the group; they wanted $1 million each, for a total of $19 million a year. Vine wasn’t even profitable, and the company’s standing with Twitter was shaky. She couldn’t imagine how to pitch it: $19 million annually for a group of creators who posted juvenile and problematic content and were already top-fixing the app. It was not going to happen.

Twitter executives were also against the deal, believing that paying creators could set a bad precedent. Years earlier, it had been a huge ask for celebrities to tweet free. If Twitter started giving money to Viners, they worried every celebrity would want to be paid for their tweets.

Spencer told the creators the money wasn’t coming. They were furious. She explained that Vine was still being incubated by Twitter, that they simply didn’t have the cash. The creators accused her of lying.

To make matters worse, news about the potential deal was already spreading. Some 1600 Viners began bragging to other Vine stars about the $1 million payouts. Creator Lele Pons told her friend Gabbie Hanna, who was not at the meeting, about what happened. Hanna then called Spencer, livid, demanding to know why she was left out. “If you don’t give me the same deal and pay me $1 million, I’m telling everyone on the app,” Spencer recalled Hanna saying.

In the months that followed, the 1600 Viners all but ceased publishing original content to Vine. Instead, they posted video after video encouraging fans to follow them on Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Musical.ly, and Facebook. Mid-level Viners, encouraged to defect by the 1600 Vine crowd, also began fleeing the platform.

Vine pursued a last-ditch effort to retain its talent, but it was too late. Instagram and Facebook had built out entire creator partnerships teams by that point and courted Vine talent aggressively.

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.

Twitter as a whole was in a perilous spot in 2016, due in part to the broader industry’s pivot to video. The app was hemorrhaging users, ad revenue was flagging and its stock was cratering. The company’s product, engineering, media and HR directors had all left by midyear.

On Oct. 27, 2016, Twitter announced it was shutting Vine down. All but 10 Vine employees were immediately laid off. Those who remained spent their days archiving and arranging to relaunch Vine as a simple camera app. It would host all of Vine’s existing videos, but no one could post anything new. In January 2017, the app was discontinued.