B2B Marketing blogger and social media influencer Marissa Pick summed up the Friday death of mobile video pioneer Vine in one expertly administered Tweet: Bill Hader’s Stefon, of Saturday Night Live fame, waves over and over from a gif she attached to a TechCrunch story.
Sorry, not sorry, the gif screams, exuberant in its victory over the short-form video app that Twitter acquired for $30 million in 2012 and then shuttered on Thursday.
The death of Vine comes on the same day that Twitter announced layoffs of 9% of its staff. “Millions of people have turned to Vine to laugh at loops and see creativity unfold,” a company post on Medium stated.
What’s next? The company doesn’t seem to know. Existing Vines will remain available until further notice, the statement promised. “We’ll be working closely with creators to make sure your questions are answered and will work hard to do this the right way.”
The Vine app produced looping 6-second videos, hardly the bedrock of any B2B marketing campaign, but a novelty item that captured humor and time-lapse animations in Vines from companies as serious as GE and Microsoft.
Adweek’s homage to the video app noted that Instagram and Snapchat had peeled away young users, and that an inability to target specific categories of viewers had left marketers looking to those same competitors.
