Twitter recently announced that it was shutting down Vine, the famous short-form video app. The shutdown was attributed to the declining number of users, but it appears that the decision was made after a closed-door meeting last fall where top Vine creators staged an intervention to save it.
The stars behind Vine gathered inside a conference room in Los Angeles to meet with the app's Creative Development Lead, Karyn Spencer. They apparently felt that the app was failing so they thought of a last-ditch effort to save it from shutting down. The creators proposed that they would, on a monthly basis, produce 12 original content for the app if the company would agree to pay all of them $1.2 million each, open up a more direct line of communication, and roll out several product changes.
Theoretically, the proposal could help generate billions of views and boost engagement for Vine, and all the company had to do was say yes to paying the content creators. However, Tech Mic reported that there was already a struggle because at the time the meeting took place as most of the influential Viners had already started to move to other social media platforms.
Amanda Cerny, an actress and Vine creator with more 4.7 million followers, said she and her fellow creators started to post on Instagram more because "We all started to notice our numbers became less and less, while Instagram was growing."
Another concern was the growth of online harassment. One of the product changes that the Viners had requested was for the company to deal with harassment. Some Vine creators complained that Vine's sister company, Twitter also did not handle the issue very well.
Jon Paul Piques, a Vine creator with 3 million followers, said that they wanted the company to add comment filters so they could block negative and foul languages from their comments.
But the creators deemed that the changes came a little too late, and because Vine also refused to pay up, they decided that it was time to move to a friendlier social media platform.