how vine died but TikTok was able to thrive
In: Economics
When Vine existed, most of the paying avenues didn’t exist or were less developed. Things like patreon things like ads, things like different types of sponsorship, things like ad read, things like crowdfunding.
This is a good podcast that explains it. One of the founders is on it.
Tldr, lip sync videos were the cause!
1. Tiktok’s alrogithm is much more sophisticated
2. Longer video length
Those people saying that tiktok generates more revenue through ads and other means aren’t wrong but that is pretty irrelevant here. Tiktok would never die because of their profitability or lack thereof either with their ccp backing. Their value in information warfare isn’t affected by the revenue they generate.
I think I’ve seen this question asked before, or it was a similar topic about something that was answered something like this: “Make it valuable to attractive white teenage girls and all the attention will flock to wherever they are and whatever they’re doing”.
I’m sure the fact that Vine was almost certainly blocked from the Chinese internet and how TikTok is a Chinese app made available to the biggest online population in the world has something to do with it as well.
Content creation got easier and therefore increased. AI technology progressed and made it possible for TikTok to introduce a groundbreaking personalized recommendation algorithm. So when you watch TikTok, you mostly see what you really want to see. Even if it isn’t always what you think you want.
This results in great user retention, which results in great ad revenue.
Instagram was becoming more popular as well. Users could only post pictures, but then videos became a thing like vine
6 second videos were very limiting and the social media platforms offered the same thing but with more freedom. Vines could be funny but they just really restricted themselves with being 6 seconds into so no other content could really thrive.
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.
TikTok is a whole different beast, bringing in ideas from vine and Snapchat. It’s also something of a super app with revenue generating extra services like online shops and livestreaming.
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