HN Explorer

Is Vine's shutdown going to create a vacuum?

5 points by lgse ↗ HN
I'm just curious, where are those 5 million daily users going to go. Instagram doesn't have the same vibe. If someone was to launch a Vine clone with similar/better features, would it stick? Could we grab some of that audience?

12 comments

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genieyclo
Do it for the Vine.
lgse
I'll take that for a yes!
Elof
maybe back to tumblr?... curious if Periscope is on the chopping block next
lgse
I think Periscope aligns more with Twitter's "live" vision. But yes, it's definitely next if anything.
Elof
It definitely does seem to align better. It was pretty interesting watching the debate on their platform and I can imagine sportsball getting more involved there as well
chris_7
I watched a sportsball on Twitter once and it was really the same as ESPN's site or the pirate streams from reddit, once you fullscreen it. Just another live stream, there (thankfully) wasn't any Twitter integration popping over the sports.
mtmail
https://beme.com/ is in that market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beme
lgse
It doesn't have a desktop version, which makes me think it's not really. I'd release a desktop first version with a video editor for creating nice loops.
chris_7
Are the four images on that page supposed to be animating smoothly? Mine are hard transitioning every second or so, serially from left to right. Weird.
mtmail
To be honest I never understood their homepage. It doesn't explain what the app is and what you can do with it. That's why I added the wikipedia link.
notahacker
If Twitter doesn't think it can make enough money from it to justify keeping it alive having built massive mindshare and a social media sales operation it doesn't exactly augur well for the long term prospects of profitability of such a venture.

Not that I'd suggest for a moment that people here couldn't raise a lot of VC money for another viral video business to fill that niche, build it and sell it. Probably to Twitter...

lgse
Twitter never tried to monetize the platform. Not only that, it was prohibited to content creators to make product placements. I think it could be profitable with sponsored posts and in-app purchases. That said, I don't think any VC would jump on anytime soon to finance such venture.