End of the line for Vine: how its audience fled, along with the video stars it created

Jerome Jarre hasn’t posted on Vine in more than a year.

The 26-year-old goofy Frenchman once ruled the six-second looping video platform, where he drew in millions of viewers with clips of him walking up to unsuspecting strangers and saying, “I love you.” But by 2014, he was already doing similar videos on Snapchat, where teens were beginning to spend hours sending each other selfies.

Jarre noticed that Vine, which once had a thriving following, was starting to fade. “We all know the app had been deserted by the audience a long time ago,” Jarre wrote in an e-mail. “The true friends are not those platforms we use. They are the people that follow the journey and enjoy what we create.”

Jarre and other Vine stars have seen for years what Twitter made official on Thursday: Vine is dead.

Four years after acquiring it, Twitter is shutting down the app, though it will keep its videos on the web. The announcement came a few hours after the company reported third-quarter earnings and said it would cut 9 percent of its staff. “To all the creators out there — thank you for taking a chance on this app back in the day,” Vine said in a statement.

But many of these creators had long since moved on to bigger—and better-paying—pursuits. Vine peaked in August 2014, when the app was used at least once a month by 3.64 per cent of all Android mobile users in the U.S., compared with just 0.66 per cent today, according to research firm 7Park Data.