Live data from Hacker News

Vine will be discontinuing the mobile app

medium.com

61–70 of 166 posts

Re: Vine will be discontinuing the mobile app

#61
post #47
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the answer, but I do remember people saying that Google was making a huge mistake buying the unmonetizable YouTube.

YouTube is long form video though. Plenty of content to advertise on. Where are you going to cram ads in to vine without it being annoying enough for adblockers to nuke them?

It's fun that we consider 3 minute clips to be "long form" nowadays. When YouTube was being bought people said that it only consisted of short amateur clips and copyright violations; two things advertisers would supposedly not be interested in.

Now I'm not saying that Vine is the next YouTube or even that it is monetizable, just that "we haven't figured it out yet" is not a convincing argument, and surely its userbase would be appealing to some buyer.

Re: Vine will be discontinuing the mobile app

#63

comScore reports just under 5m uniques for Vine.co last month. It may be down on the height of its popularity but 5m unique users is a decent mass of people to monetise. Seems an odd thing to kill and not at least try to sell.

Vine "stars" are moving to Snapchat, they'll bring their viewers as well.

Re: Vine will be discontinuing the mobile app

#66
All the Vine celebrities have moved on to Instagram and YouTube. I opened it up a few weeks ago, forgetting I still had it installed in a folder, and all the big names I followed hadn't published anything in months. So I deleted the app and decided it was pretty much finished.

Re: Vine will be discontinuing the mobile app

#67
post #61
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is long form video though. Plenty of content to advertise on. Where are you going to cram ads in to vine without it being annoying enough for adblockers to nuke them?

It's fun that we consider 3 minute clips to be "long form" nowadays. When YouTube was being bought people said that it only consisted of short amateur clips and copyright violations; two things advertisers would supposedly not be interested in. Now I'm not saying that Vine is the next YouTube or even that it is monetizable, just that "we haven't figured it out yet" is not a convincing argument, and surely its userbas…

Well to be honest I'm not a hive mind. When I said long form it's quite likely I was mistaken. I was under the impression YouTube started with 15 minute videos which is infinitely longer than 6 second clips or whatever vine is.

"We're losing money on it and have to fire people from the main company we should probably not keep this thing alive and we dont want competitors to our main product now it does videos neither" is definitely a convincing argument

Re: Vine will be discontinuing the mobile app

#68
post #31

comScore reports just under 5m uniques for Vine.co last month. It may be down on the height of its popularity but 5m unique users is a decent mass of people to monetise. Seems an odd thing to kill and not at least try to sell.

How would you go about making any money off it though? Nobody's going to sit through an ad when the video is only a few seconds long

Isn't the exact same criticism relevant to Snap too?

They're solving it by bringing native content from partners on board - would have thought Twitter would do the same with Vine.

Re: Vine will be discontinuing the mobile app

#70
post #57

Congress should make it illegal for a public company to shut down apps that see this much usage, unless the employees are quitting. Some users have 12 million followers.

That is the last possible thing we'd want. We already have contract law that covers the case where a customer has paid a provider to provide a service and the service provider stops without delivering. But, in the case of a free service, where there are no commitments, service providers should be free to stop providing services whenever they want.
Post reply on HN