Vine died this week, the creative part at least. You can still watch them (the Internet is forever, etc.). When I need to smile, I probably will. Because those dolphin impressions from Sara Hopkins? Those are something special.
I’d seen the big one before, the one at a family Christmas party held the day she graduated from Auburn that elicited what that godawful Buzzfeed called “The Most Hilarious Vine Reaction Ever.”
But one of the followups kills me.
The lip sync to “Ice Cream Paint Job” is pretty great, too — 100 million loops great.
I recently-ish interviewed Hopkins and fellow Auburn-educated Vine superstar Meghan McCarthy (must be something in the water) for Auburn Magazine. (Read the story here.)
Both have already used their Vine audience (Sara’s currently stands at 1 million followers, Meghan has 3.5 million) to build a social media safety net to preserve and grow their personal brand, because both could see it coming.
Hopkins is now more recognized from Snapchat and Instagram. She’s being sponsored by T.J. Maxx and Anheuser-Busch. Last summer, Israel–as in the country–paid her to pub crawl across Tel-Aviv to show how hip the Holy Land has apparently become. The videos are kinda fun.
McCarthy, on the other hand, is in Hopkins’ words “really killin’ it” on YouTube thanks in no small part to the cartoon character living in her throat. Her channel has 1.8 million subscribers. Her most popular video, TALK IN YOUR REAL VOICE!, has more than 9 million views. She’s using that real voice to get voice acting gigs–she’s Tiggle the teddy bear on Go90’s Miss 2059–and introduce bendable cell phones with Ashton Kutcher.
But it’s all thanks to Vine. It changed their lives. So what happened?
Sara Hopkins:
The amount of users on it has drastically decreased especially since the biggest creators jumped off early on. If you look at Vine as a platform, only two percent of people on it were actually making content. The rest of the people were consumers. So if the biggest of the two percent jump off then their followers will probably jump off, too. Yeah, the decreases been pretty drastic.
I noticed it just when the interaction started to go down on Vine for videos that would have done well,” she says. People would say, ‘yeah, I used to watch you on Vine.’ It wasn’t ‘I watch you on Vine,’ it was ‘I used to.’ A lot of times now, most people recognize me from Snapchat rather than Vine anyway.
I know they weren’t making Twitter any money, because none of it was monetized or anything. It just kind of made sense for Twitter to cut it off. It’s kind of a dead, broken limb. It’s a lame horse, they had to shoot it.
Meghan McCarthy
They didn’t tell creators ahead of time, so we didn’t know the app was going to be taken away completely. But most of us who have been on the app since 2013 have been feeling for a while that it was going down. Honestly, I think Vine made some not so great decisions and that kind of led to a lot of big creators mostly leaving the app, which meant their following kind of left the app as well. So for a while now I’ve been moving on to YouTube and also traditional acting. We kind of knew it was slowly dying but none of the creators knew that the app was going to be deleted completely. But I believe the website will be will still be up for people to watch vines on.
I did a YouTube video about all my thoughts about it, but it’s definitely sad that it’s going to be gone.
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