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People were still using Vine?
It's pretty good for when you basically want an animated GIF with sound. Works well for cute animal clips that wind up on Tumblr.

But I don't see how you get a viable business model out of that.

Yeah, no way you could get a business out of GIFs right?

http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/16/giphy-closes-55-million-ser...

(In all seriousness, I think the recent GBoard is an example of how gifs can play a central role in the user's OS, which is prime real estate)

Investment != business.
No, it sums the line of thinking in startups pretty well. Convince suckers to give you money, spend $25,000/employee on lunches. Figure out how to be profitable "later". It shouldn't be hard. You can write code after all!
Agreed, but most investors will not part with that kind of money unless they believe in the plan for turning it into way more money (... at least I hope so.)

Of course, some investors are idiots, so you have to take their confidence with a grain of salt. But the past decade has proved that there is value to building a large and loyal userbase. As long as big companies continue to acquire those userbases for large price tags, investing in the userbases can remain a justifiably smart idea.

From the article "Shockingly enough, Giphy is not yet monetizing."

At this point I would say it's more of a platform than a business.

> Some Vine stars charge as much as six figures for a branded Vine, a pricey bet for buyers.

6 figures, for 6 seconds of video. Sounds about right.

Can't even read the article with the distracting autoplay vines repeating over and over. Worse than autorepeat gifs.
Maybe because their video player takes forever to load and so you go off and do something else and then all of a sudden you get a REALLY LOUD VIDEO playing in one of your tabs that you can't find and it's some dude yelling FUUCCKKKKKKK for 6 seconds.. or something.

Then it autoplays forever.

Edit: Does anybody get this problem? Vines take forever for me to load so I can imagine how many people just don't bother if this happens for everyone.