how vine died but TikTok was able to thrive
In: Economics
One of the things I’ve not seen anyone else mention yet was how Facebook cut off Vine’s access to its API the day it launched on iOS.
The call came right from the top, because Zuckerberg knew it well, that latching on to the network effect of an existing social media was exactly how Facebook grew so fast to then eclipse MySpace.
That massively hampered their growth, even with how popular it was for a time, and must have played some part in Twitter’s decision to eventually pull the plug.
The main issue was of course monetization, but with greater growth they’d have had more time to figure that out. Made it more enticing for Twitter to double down on it, rather than breaking it down for parts and making its own video sharing service etc.
There are many reasons for how TikTok captured the market and continues to thrive, whereas Vine’s roadmap towards success was never fully clear and was massively hampered early on. And part of that was just how early on to the scene they were. Tiktok learnt from the skeletons of its predecessors, including its direct predecessors whether it was Cicada that turned in to Musical.ly that was acquired and incorporated in to Douyin which was then rebranded on to the international markets as TikTok. All Vine had was Vine. And so it served as yet another guidepost for ByteDance in making TikTok.
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