Vine Stars Revealed To Have Asked For Money, Product Changes To Keep The Platform From Dying

Twitter announced last Thursday that it was shutting down Vine, the short-form, video-sharing app where users can record six-second clips. Now, it appears the reason behind this has been revealed after it was found out recently that the biggest stars of Vine threatened to leave the platform unless they get paid for content and unless Twitter makes improvements to the app.

The problem with Vine is that the number of users and video views kept on falling. It simply wasn’t able to compete with other services like Snapchat and Instagram in terms of user engagement. In order to keep the platform alive, Vine creators made an offer: compensation in exchange for content. This was first reported back in March by BuzzFeed.

Now, new details on those negotiations have surfaced thanks to an interview with the stars themselves. It was revealed that 18 Vine stars approached the Twitter-owned platform and asked for $1.2 million each and some changes to the app's features. In exchange, all 18 of them will make 12 pieces of monthly original content or three Vines per week, according to Mic.

The Vine stars also proposed several product changes, such as comment filters to block offensive language. Vine did eventually roll out some sort of filter option, but it was just a little too late. The stars also asked other additional features like the ability to add links to captions, improved recommendation page and better video-editing tools.

After the negotiations in March, Vine’s biggest stars began going on other social networks like Instagram, YouTube and Facebook to keep in touch with fans and to continue creating content. If Vine agreed to those terms, it could have potentially generated billions of views for the platform and it could have boosted user engagement. “We all started to notice our numbers became less and less, while Intsagram was growing,” actress and Vine content creator Amanda Cerny told Mic. “We all started posting [on Instagram] more.”

The company eventually turned down the offer, prompting Vine’s biggest stars to completely abandon the dying platform. This of course led to the announcement last week that Vine will soon be shut down.