Vine Ownership & Progression

Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll originally founded vine about three months before Twitter bought it, and they realized that Vine’s culture was going to shift towards creativity and experimentation. Vine was built in 2012 and Twitter bought them for $30 that fall (Kokalitcheva, 2016). The launch of video on Instagram in 2013 blunted its growth, and as with the rest of Twitter, its product added features at a glacial place. Eventually, Hofmann left Vine and went on to develop his own set of mobile apps and Yusupov was laid off from Twitter in 2015 (Kokalitcheva, 2016).

In the beginning of 2012, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had acquired Instagram for $1 billion and the deal was so sudden it took 2 days to finalize. Before that deal, Twitter offered Instagram $525 million before they chose Facebook’s offer (Byford, 2012). Instagram’s founder Kevin Systrom had told associates that he was not interested in selling, months before Zuckerberg’s call. At this point as well, Instagram had just completed a second round of funding, suggesting they were looking to remain independent. After this happened, by Systrom selling to Facebook, he lost an ally, which was Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey (Robertson, 2012). He had supported Instagram and allegedly expressed interest in buying it in the past few months. Since the acquisition, Dorsey had apparently stopped using the service, though his company declined to comment officially (Robertson, 2012).

Twitter acquired Vine just weeks before it launched, spent several months tweaking it and finally debuted it to the world on January 24, 2013 as a standalone app with Twitter integration. Twitter’s CEO at the time and Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann posted the first video clip in a tweet using Vine. When posting a Vine on Twitter, they show you the clips embedded in the tweets instead of bouncing you to a web page (Robertson, 2013). Twitter did not integrate Vine’s technology and launch it as “videos” inside the Twitter app because Vine invented a new medium or art form, as Dorsey calls it.

Byford, S. (2012). Instagram agreed to sell to Twitter for $525 million before

choosing Facebook, says NYT. Retrieved December 1, 2016, from

http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/16/3774502/instagram-agreed-

twitter-sale-before-facebook

Kokalitcheva, K. (2016). Vine’s Co-Founders Already Have a New App. Retrieved

December 1, 2016, from http://fortune.com/2016/10/27/vie-founders-new-app-

hype/

Robertson, A. (2012). Twitter wanted to buy Instagram before Facebook’s purchase, says

NYT. Retrieved from http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/14/2948528/instagram-

facebook-acquisition-company-history

Robertson, A. (2013). Twitter’s upcoming Vine-powered video functionality teased by

CEO. Retrieved from http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3908078/twitter-ceos-