5. Do It For The Vine

Summary

Summary of "Vine: Six Seconds That Changed The World"

Episode 5: "Do It For The Vine"

Release Date: April 29, 2025
Host: Benedict Townsend
Producer: Mary Goodheart
Guests: Taylor Lorenz, Karen Spencer, Russ Yusupov, Brendan McNerney

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the rise and fall of Vine’s most powerful creators—the “Vine Mafia” at 1600 Vine—and the mounting tension between these stars and Vine HQ. Host Benedict Townsend and producer Mary Goodheart hunt for a first-hand account of the legendary confrontation between top Viners and Vine's management. They interview insider Karen Spencer, who bridges the worlds of creators and HQ, revealing internal company chaos, mismanagement, and the fundamental misunderstanding between the platform and its stars. As Vine faces existential threats and its founders depart, critical mistakes and missed opportunities shape its demise, setting the stage for a climactic “freakout before the storm.”

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The “Vine Mafia” and Their Grip on the Platform

[00:22]

• Taylor Lorenz, tech journalist, details how the top 20 creators at 1600 Vine collaborated to dominate the platform:
  • "They would plan out their content, and they really created this clique... They would revine each other's content...and manipulate what became popular on the app." (Taylor Lorenz, 00:22)
  • The group followed a disciplined schedule: daily brainstorms, scripting, recording, and mutual promotion.
• Their collaboration unintentionally weakened Vine by consolidating influence, leading to creative stagnation and resentment from outsiders.

2. The Great Confrontation: Seeking Insider Accounts

[01:44]

• The episode builds suspense around a secretive, high-stakes meeting between top creators and Vine leadership at 1600 Vine.
• Benedict and Mary unsuccessfully seek first-hand accounts—until discovering Karen Spencer, Vine’s elusive former Head of Creators, now living off-grid in Costa Rica.

3. Monetization & The Rise of IRL Fan Events

[05:12]

• Lorenz explains the emergence of MAGCON, a touring collective of Vine stars, and flash mob-like meetups that sometimes spiraled into chaos:
  • "They swarmed Central Park. It got shut down by the police." (Taylor Lorenz, 05:12)
• These events demonstrated the creators’ real-world influence and desperate search for income streams—not just brand deals but ticketed tours, though talent often lagged behind fame.

4. Inside the Life of a “Mid-Level” Viner

[08:28]

• Interview with Brendan McNerney (700,000 followers) gives insight into the creator hierarchy and their creative anxieties:
  • Top creators strategized ruthlessly, deleting underperforming Vines to maintain prestige and CPM (monetization rate).
  • "If it doesn't hit X views by a certain hour, they delete. This one's a delete." (Brendan McNerney, 09:01)
  • Pressure to perform led to burnout and a hyper-competitive, sometimes toxic, community dynamic.

5. The Founders’ Exodus and Culture Shock at HQ

[12:15]

• Dom Hoffman and Colin Kroll, two of Vine’s three founders, left within a year.
  • "I felt a bit let down...it did start to feel lonely." (Russ Yusupov, 12:47)
  • Company culture declined post-Twitter acquisition, with allegations of mismanagement and misconduct.
• Finally, Russ Yusupov also departs amid broader layoffs at Twitter, marking Vine's total leadership vacuum.

6. The Arrival of Karen Spencer: Bridging Creators and HQ

[19:48]

• Karen, with roots in Hollywood and influencer agencies, is hired to bridge growing gaps:
  • "The founders of Vine did not believe in social media influencers...there was a mandate no one was to talk to Vine Stars." (Karen Spencer, 25:27)
• Her role is to reconcile HQ’s artistic, idealistic vision with the platform’s evolving reality—but internal resistance hampers this.

7. Major Disconnect: Creators vs. Vine's Artistic Vision

[27:33]

• Founders desire a democratized, artful space, not "teenage humor content."
  • "You can't dictate the tides to the ocean." (Karen Spencer, 27:33)
  • Comedy and viral skits dominate, while niche creators and artists are sidelined.
• King Bach, Vine’s top star, says, "I thought Vine just didn’t like Black people," highlighting communication failures with all creators. (Karen Spencer relays, 30:20)

8. Hostility and Sabotage from Management

[30:31]

• Taylor Lorenz recounts deliberate moves by Vine HQ to thwart creators’ success:
  • With vanity URLs, "they intentionally said no to make things harder for the creators." (Taylor Lorenz, 30:31)
  • Vine’s popular feed was secretly curated to suppress certain creators.
  • "The founders would constantly mess with the popular feed...stack the popular feed with content that they approved of." (Taylor Lorenz, 31:53)
• Russ Yusupov frames decisions as efforts to broaden content, not target individuals.

9. Monetization Struggles, Code Red, and Leadership Chaos

[36:23]

• After Instagram launches video, Vine’s stats nosedive ("code red"), the daily stats board is unplugged.
  • "I was told we are in code red and that’s why you’re here." (Karen Spencer, 36:23)
• Internal power struggles ensue; Vine is expensive to operate, lacks revenue, and is increasingly a financial burden on Twitter.

10. Last-Ditch Rescue Attempt: The Vine HQ Party

[38:48]

• Karen organizes a pivotal event—a party—as an olive branch to top creators, hoping to salvage relations:
  • "It was a bat signal to the creators that, like, they are now taken seriously." (Brendan McNerney, 39:03)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Taylor Lorenz on the Vine Mafia [00:22]:
  "They controlled what was popular on the app...It was very susceptible to manipulation by the top creators."
• Benedict Townsend on the search for the confrontation [01:53]:
  "Every creator we’ve tried to talk to...we haven’t been able to get hold of. Complete silence."
• Karen Spencer’s new life [03:34]:
  "She’s living in the jungle...running a pottery workshop."
• Brendan McNerney on cruel metrics [09:01]:
  "If it doesn't hit X views by a certain hour, they delete. This one's a delete."
• Taylor Lorenz on Vine’s sabotage [30:31]:
  "They intentionally said no to make things harder for the creators and to thwart discovery of the creators."
• Karen Spencer on HQ's artistic snobbery [27:33]:
  "As soon as it became clear there would be this high school situation...all of that stuff was, like, disgusting to them."
• Karen Spencer reflecting creators’ confusion [30:20]:
  "King Bach...said, 'Oh, I thought Vine just didn’t like Black people.' And I said, 'No, Vine just didn't like creators in general.'"
• Karen Spencer on the existential crisis [36:23]:
  "We were just basically freeloading off of Twitter, you know, which could definitely have contributed to the fact that Twitter was hostile towards us and we were at an impasse."

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• The Vine Mafia explained – 00:22–01:14
• The confrontation and Karen Spencer lead – 01:44–04:32
• MAGCON, monetization & fan events – 05:12–07:07
• Inside being a mid-level creator – 08:28–11:03
• Founder exits and internal dysfunction – 12:15–14:27
• Life and vision clash at Vine HQ – 19:27–25:27
• Resistance to influencers & creators – 25:27–27:33
• The ugly side of suppression – 30:31–32:42
• Vine’s “code red” and leadership vacuum – 36:23–38:48
• The climactic party and bat signal to creators – 39:03–39:19

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Tone & Style

The episode balances investigative zeal with wry, meme-informed humor, preserving a tone that’s equally reverential and irreverent towards internet history. The speakers, particularly Benedict and Mary, riff off one another’s curiosity and skepticism, while interviewees provide inside scoops and often frank, critical reflection.

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Conclusion

This episode peels back the curtain on the struggle for power and respect between creators and platform, exposing Vine’s fatal missteps: a refusal to embrace its stars, mismanagement after a founder exodus, and an aversion to monetization. As the tempest brews, the coming confrontation promises to reveal who—or what—truly killed Vine.

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For listeners interested in early internet culture, platform economics, or the roots of today's creator economy (and TikTok’s rise), this episode delivers rare insider insight and drama, setting up the series' pivotal moments to come.

Transcript

[Benedict Townsend]

This is a Global Player original podcast. On our last episode, we learned of Sweet baby Vine's bittersweet graduation into the mainstream as content, copycats and competition crowded the platform. Taylor Lorenz, a celebrated tech journalist well known for her coverage of vine, summarizes it all pretty well.

[Taylor Lorenz]

Essentially, these top creators at 1600 vine were like the vine mafia. They controlled what was popular on the app. Because the app was not algorithmic, it was very susceptible to manipulation by the top creators. And the top creators all joined together, about 20 of them, and they would plan out their content, and they really created this click where, like, they would revine each other's content, essentially resharing each other's content and collaborate and manipulate what became popular on the app. You're a content creator. You post one video, you have it Revined by the 20 other most popular creators on the app. Like, that's going to be a top video on the app now. And they had this kind of cadence to their schedule. They would wake up every morning, they would meet often down by the pool at 1600 Vine. They would brainstorm ideas, script things out for the day, spend the afternoon recording, and then edit and post. And, yeah, they had this machine going for a while.

[Benedict Townsend]

This is all leading up to that confrontation that we all know is coming right on their home turf. The 1600 Viners had figured out how to dominate the platform game, the system, and now their influence is exploding along with their sense of entitlement.

[Mary Goodheart]

I mean, you can feel the foreshadowing, can't you, Mary?

[Benedict Townsend]

You can taste the foreshadowing. You've got this group of people who live on vine street who have worked out how to completely dominate the app, have this incredible sense of entitlement, and now they're mad.

[Mary Goodheart]

And we know that this is leading to the confrontation. Yeah, we know exactly where this is going. And it's so frustrating because this is exactly the point where the mystery begins.

[Benedict Townsend]

For us, because we started with this climactic meeting that everyone's heard of and everyone has a take of, but no one seems to have been at. We cannot get any information from people inside the room. Every creator we've tried to talk to, who was inside the room, we haven't been able to get hold of complete silence. But apparently you have a lead. I do have a lead, and I'm very intrigued.

[Mary Goodheart]

Okay. So we, up till this point, we'd been looking mainly at the creators who were. And there's sort of a vague list of who we think is there, but actually, I have a Lead on the side of vine hq. So this is actually someone who has been mentioned to us a few times by creators. This is a lady called Karen Spencer.

[Benedict Townsend]

Yes, this name, Karen, has come up quite a few times.

[Mary Goodheart]

So she joined vine in 2015. According to her LinkedIn, she was head of creators, which already makes her kind of pretty fascinating because we're looking at this, you know, we've got the vine team and then we've got the creators. They're sort of two separate worlds. And the fact that she was brought in to be a bridge between them already. I want to talk to her especially.

[Benedict Townsend]

Because those are two worlds that seem to be in almost constant tension.

[Mary Goodheart]

Exactly. So in the course of reading about her, I found one article that just casually mentioned that she was there leading the conversation for Vine.

[Benedict Townsend]

So she was in the room.

[Mary Goodheart]

She was in the room.

[Benedict Townsend]

And she led that meeting. And as far as I know, and we've read extensively about this, I don't think anyone else, anywhere else has had a proper first hand account of that meeting.

[Mary Goodheart]

No.

[Benedict Townsend]

So if we could get her, it would be huge.

[Mary Goodheart]

It would be.

[Benedict Townsend]

But here is the twist. Why must there be a but and a twist?

[Mary Goodheart]

It is so incredibly clear that she has moved on with her life.

[Benedict Townsend]

Okay.

[Mary Goodheart]

And she has done it in the most dramatic way you could imagine. She's literally moved to Costa Costa Rica.

[Benedict Townsend]

Right.

[Mary Goodheart]

She's living in the jungle.

[Benedict Townsend]

Right.

[Mary Goodheart]

Running a pottery workshop.

[Benedict Townsend]

Ah. That does imply a person who probably left tech behind and might not want to talk about vine anymore.

[Mary Goodheart]

There's been complete silence. So my fear is, is that she's someone who's gone. That was a fun bit of my life. I was very high achieving and now I want to go live in the jungle and make pots.

[Benedict Townsend]

You say that, but then you send me a video that has given us a little glimmer of hope. It's a video. It's an Instagram story or something of her walking through the jungle over a rope brid. And she's wearing a bag. What does that bag say, Mary?

[Mary Goodheart]

The bag swinging from her back. It's got the vine logo on it.

[Benedict Townsend]

It's got the vine logo.

[Mary Goodheart]

And I saw this and I was kind of at my wit's end with this and just it was like, oh, another post from her and look at her in the jungle and she's still not replied to me. And then this swung into shot and I was like, it's a sign.

[Benedict Townsend]

It's a sign.

[Mary Goodheart]

Because I feel like if she's still repping a bit of Vine Swag, if we can call it Vine. Swag in the jungle. Part of her heart, I think, still belongs to Vine.

[Benedict Townsend]

I think we can get her. I choose to believe. While the search for Karen continues, let's get back to Hollywood, where rentals do not come cheap. By strengthening their own share of the vine space, the 1600 Viners opened a wormhole, inevitably weakening the platform. As competition intensified, creators had to seize every opportunity to monetize their followings, to sustain their income streams, moving beyond the basics of standard brand deals. It wasn't easy, but like the folks selling shovels during the gold rush, if you were smart, there was money to be made. You just had to know how. Take magcon, for example. Oh, how to explain magcon. You know, I'll let Vine expert Taylor Lorenz have a go.

[Taylor Lorenz]

Oh, my God. Okay, so magcon was founded by this entrepreneur, Bart Bordelin. He had the idea for this sort of, like, teen tour of vine stars. And so this was when you started to see basically a lot of content creators go on tour to make money, because there was starting to bridge the kind of, like, digital and physical worlds. You started to see a lot of early vine meetups just get, like, blow up. Like, there was this early vine meetup in Central park with, I think it was Nicholas Nagalis, Rudy Mancuso, but some of the top creators on the app and literally hundreds of people came. They swarmed Central Park. It got shut down by the police.

[Benedict Townsend]

Another famous IRL meetup featured Nash Greer, the most followed creator at the time with 5 million followers, and Jerome Jar, who had a measly 4 million followers visiting Iceland. The country, not the British supermarket. They let their followers know they were going to be at a shopping mall at a certain time. Here's how that went.

[Mary Goodheart]

You stole the name.

[Taylor Lorenz]

Oh, yeah.

[Mary Goodheart]

But.

[Benedict Townsend]

Yeah, they got completely mobbed. Absolute chaos, screaming crowd crush. The mall ended up having to be shut down for safety fears. In fact, the authorities had to burn down the Maul and salt the earth so another mall could never bloom there again. Okay, I made up that last part, but it was pretty crazy.

[Taylor Lorenz]

And so I think Bart and others started to recognize the opportunity of kind of IRL events with Viners. And so the idea was to take these, you know, this young talent from vine and put them on a traveling tour where they would perform for, you know, hordes of adoring teenage fans, mostly girls.

[Benedict Townsend]

And when you say perform.

[Taylor Lorenz]

I know, right, Perform. I mean, this is what the whole problem with these tours.

[Benedict Townsend]

Yeah, for those who don't know, like, what exactly are they? I think the number one question most people would have is what are they doing on stage? And I don't think anyone ever knew.

[Taylor Lorenz]

Well, I will say, listen, Shawn Mendes carried magcon on his back because Shawn Mendes. Shawn Mendes, obviously, as everyone knows now, is like a very successful musician, so he performed music. Mostly it was just doing like funny skits and jokes in front of the audience because these boys didn't have any kind of discernible, like, talents that they were really known for outside. Just like, kind of being hot and like making funny videos, like relatable videos. And so they would get up on stage and they would mostly just kind of like joke around with each other. But there wasn't. It wasn't. I mean, this is why a lot of these tours failed in the end is because they couldn't really perform. But the people that came really didn't care that much. Like, a lot of the young kids didn't care that much because they just wanted to meet their favorite vine star.

[Benedict Townsend]

With all the fame and the fanfare, the 1600 Viners closed ranks. Getting access to people who Witness Life at 1600 vine has not been easy. We reached out to seemingly everyone who has ever lived there. None of them would speak to us. But there were some people who had a little peek behind the curtain, and we found one. I know what 420 means. You're having sex, okay?

[Mary Goodheart]

You got a medium pizza, three Big.

[Brendan McNerney]

Macs, and a side of fried pickles.

[Karen Spencer]

That's my dog's shit.

[Brendan McNerney]

Well, that was my second guess.

[Benedict Townsend]

With 700,000 followers, Brendan McNerney fell solidly within Vine's classification of a mid level creator. That's what counted as mid level. He wouldn't sell out any tours, but he was consistently producing popular content. And as a creator, he was flexible. His material later veered towards the absurd. He was more interested in pushing boundaries than maintaining popularity. But he was always well connected on the creator grapevine, and he spent good deal of time with the 1600 Viners. Of all the people I spoke to, he has the best insights I've been able to find into what working with that group was.

[Brendan McNerney]

Actually, like, everybody that I encountered that was like top brass, like top of class creator with most following. They were great people and, like, they were generally excited to do what they do. The thing that, you know, would. Would wince at would be the, oh, this is going to be what they would say. They would say, this one's a hit or this one's a dud. And like, there they would Have a strategy. If it doesn't hit xviews by a certain hour, they delet. Yeah. Oh, that's what they say. This one's a delete. You know, this one might be a delete. And they post it. If it didn't hit, they'd remove it immediately, and then they do a different version of it a week later. And so, yeah, my opinion was they were all really nice people. They're all, all excited to be there. At some point, it became a business for them. You know, they're investing in props. They were trying to show, I think, brands, they can put production quality into their content. It could be brand friendly. But at the same time, I think at the end of the day, they were still trying to push the envelope in some way, which I think is respectable.

[Benedict Townsend]

It's interesting that you said that they would like full on delete Vines, because of course, you know, it's not monetized. Right. You're just, okay, yeah, there's brand deals out there, but ultimately, when you post a Vine, you're kind of doing it for the love of the game. Right. You know, especially in the early days. So the fact that they were dedicated enough to just fully delete videos, I don't know, I think that might surprise people.

[Brendan McNerney]

Absolutely. That got toxic. I started doing it, I started deleting videos, and I'm like, why the Am I even shooting something if I think that I might delete it? And if that was the case, I wouldn't do it. And I would go back and shoot something weirder, and then those would be the ones that, like, just popped, you know, like, you'd be like, all right, cool. Like, currently, I don't know what I'm doing, and I should just stick with that. You know, I think that there was a landscape of competitiveness in which if you posted a video and it didn't do well, you know, you're kind of looking around at your buying friends like, was that a bad idea? You know, am I not funny? Oh, God, am I not funny? And I think that that was what started it. And then I think it became about maintaining a certain level of performance from a metric standpoint that ultimately meant my worth. You know, my. The CPM that I could target is now devalued.

[Benedict Townsend]

CPM basically means how much money brands would be willing to pay a creator to promote their product. It literally means cost per meal, the value per thousand impressions on each bit of content you make. It's basically just a way to measure how valuable someone's content is. And here's the thing, vine wasn't paying any creators directly, but quantifying the value of their performance on the platform was definitely translating into money making opportunities outside of the app. These finance bro acronyms, they feel a far cry from the early days of vine, the Rebel app that was all about making video editing accessible, a creative challenge, a tool built for creativity. But it was fitting for an era where vine was going through quite a dramatic metamorphosis. On 7 January 2014, just under a year after Vine's official launch, one of its original founders, Dom Hoffman, walked away. It's pretty shocking. Vine had been his brainchild, dreamed up with Russ Yusupov, sold to Twitter and grown into a rapid cultural phenomenon. And he was leaving it all behind. Colin Kroll, founder number three, initially took over Dom's role as lead general manager. But just three months later, he also followed Dom out the door. And as the dust settled, only Russ stayed on.

[Russ Yusupov]

Yep, Dom left within the first year, Colin shortly after. I can't speak to the reasons why Dom and Colin left specifically, but it was a big hit to the company each time we lost a founder and I think it certainly changed the trajectory.

[Benedict Townsend]

I mean, these were also, you know, especially you had a long standing relationship with Dom. You know, these were friends of yours. How did it feel for you, especially when you were the last founder standing?

[Russ Yusupov]

Yeah, I felt surprising, I felt a bit let down, but I knew they had their own personal reasons and they had their own plans for what they wanted to work on next. And yeah, no hard feelings, but it did start to feel lonely after a while.

[Benedict Townsend]

Did it make you question whether or not you should stick around? Obviously you left to do HK trivia, but, you know, when they left each time, did you think, is it time for me to go as well?

[Russ Yusupov]

No, not at all. I knew that, you know, this was my baby. I, you know, even as the usage number started to decline, I felt even more fired up to continue working on it. We kept that same culture of like, all right, let's develop the roadmap, let's build features quickly, let's put them out quickly and test them the user base as quickly as possible.

[Benedict Townsend]

Former vine staff have told us that Vine's work culture had suffered at Twitter hq. And Colin later made a statement to Axios confirming that he had been let go from vine for poor management, saying he was sorry for the things he'd said and done, which made people feel unappreciated or uncomfortable. There are allegations of yelling, bullying and even creepy behaviour. Towards female employees that were levelled against the founder claims he denied. But for the others, I imagine that running a product inevitably wasn't quite as exciting as inventing and launching one. Surely a monotony sets in when you transition from potential to reality. But not according to Russ.

[Russ Yusupov]

I had a blast. Now all of a sudden, the work that I was doing had achieved greater scale, had more immediate impact, and I could see the, you know, the results much more quickly.

[Benedict Townsend]

But Russ too, ended up saying an early goodbye to Vine. On Tuesday, Twitter, the social networking service, announced it is eliminating some of its staff, laying off as many as 336 employees, roughly 8% of its workforce. In October 2015, it was announced he would leave his role as creative director as part of a restructure at Twitter, which saw over 300 Twitter employees lose their jobs. This was done ostensibly to speed up internal work at Twitter, where structures and hierarchies had become crowded and messy. It was likely also due to the fact that Twitter, much like vine, had real trouble making money, with its net income in 2015 being a cool -521 million dollars. We only know this now, but in fact, Twitter actually wouldn't make any positive net income until 2018 and 2019 before losing it again in 2020 and at the time of recording, never getting it back to you or I. This may seem slightly insane. If I was operating at a $500 million annual loss, I'd probably make a few changes, you know, maybe buy fewer coffees and avocados. But tech giants like these are used to tying value and cultural dominance. It's just that every so often, the small fact that they don't make any money and in fact lose enormous amounts of money can kind of rear its ugly head. But we'll get back to that later. Of course, not every tech company was facing the same struggle. I mean, in the first quarter of 2015, Facebook made $500 million. Because Facebook, unlike Vine or Twitter, had worked out a way to get ads in front of eyes in a way that actually made money. That's also why Instagram, Facebook's own adopted child, was allowed to roam even more freely than vine was. But none of this, of course, would be Russ concern for much longer.

[Russ Yusupov]

I did my full 3 year contract before coming up with my next product idea. Ultimately, I felt like, okay, I have another idea that I'm really passionate and curious about that I want to explore. And it seems like there's a strong team here that can continue working on Vine.

[Benedict Townsend]

That other idea that Russ was Exploring turned into a phenomenon that was known as HQ trivia. Remember that? I used to play that every day. I really did. Russ founded it along with Colin Kroll, and It grew to 2.5 million players at its peak. But that's for another podcast. With the founders all gone, vine needed a new team now. Remember Rich from episode one, the New Jersey designer who'd been super excited when vine first launched? Well, as luck would have it, by 2015, he'd bagged himself a job at Vine.

[Brendan McNerney]

My joke is that vine is probably the best job and the worst job I'll ever have.

[Benedict Townsend]

Rich started out as a regular designer and was later promoted to head of design. And you don't need to know much about tech to know that that is a positive upgrade.

[Brendan McNerney]

When we say design, it literally is. How does something work? What does it look like? How does it move when you tap on it? Basically when you open the app, how it functions and how it looks, it basically encompasses all of that. It was, like, super fun to work there. Like, going from design studios. It wasn't uncommon to, like, work pretty late. We would be in the office at 10, 11, 12 o' clock at night. It was, like, fun. I like doing it. It's the kind of thing that, like, I would never. I wouldn't do that at almost any other job. I would just be like, yeah, I'm just going to go home.

[Benedict Townsend]

Like, this is stupid.

[Brendan McNerney]

But we would hang out and, like, work would maybe happen slower, but it was because we were having fun working together.

[Benedict Townsend]

Finding staffers who understand what happened between the founders leaving and the final shutdown that spelled Vine's demise is no easy feat. No doubt due to a stack of NDAs, a sack of hurt feelings, and the small matter of a decade passing, the 1600 group refused to speak to us. The founders had long moved on, and design staffers like Rich weren't part of the high level meeting, so they weren't getting the big goss. What we really needed was someone who was privy to what actually happened in that room on vine street and on that fateful day. And we've got good news. Enter Karen Spencer, the missing piece of our puzzle. The key to unlocking the mystery of who really killed Vine. We'll hear from her right after this. And we're back. And Mary has big news.

[Mary Goodheart]

A week of ominous silence. And then she's messaged me.

[Benedict Townsend]

We got her.

[Mary Goodheart]

Yeah, she just popped up going, sorry, here's my number. WhatsApp's better. And not only did she reply, but was so friendly. And so genuinely enthusiastic and keen to talk about Vine.

[Benedict Townsend]

Like, the Viners love her. And I can see why she really lived up to the sunny reputation. Now, obviously, me and you are chomping at the bit to ask her about the meeting at vine street, and we kind of thought that would be the meat of the conversation. Wasn't even ready for all the stuff she was about to unpack about the situation she walked into at Vine. Once again, thank you for your time. I'm Ben. Nick, by the way. Usually when I talk to tech people, they're in some very industrial corner office. You're in the jungles of Costa Rica right now.

[Karen Spencer]

Yeah. I actually think it's not that unusual for people to work in tech or corporate America and kind of flip out at some point in their lives and look to do something crazy like move to the jungle.

[Benedict Townsend]

With a background so lush and green, it genuinely looks AI generated Karen in the Costa Rican jungle. A wide brimmed hat over pigtails.

[Karen Spencer]

2022. I just felt like I was losing my mind with COVID and the murder of George Floyd and the attack on the Capitol. I just could not stay in the United States any longer. So I came to visit a friend in Costa Rica and within three days decided that I would move here and brought my husband back. And we now own a pottery studio and a coffee shop. And it's amazing.

[Benedict Townsend]

I'm incredibly jealous. That is great. Up to now, the vine staffers I've spoken to have had backgrounds in the worlds of tech and app design. Karen's a bit different. Before joining vine hq, she was already at home in creative spaces and in Hollywood.

[Karen Spencer]

I grew up acting, and I was a theater major in college and really wanted to stay in that entertainment acting space. And so after living in New York for a while, I moved to Los Angeles, and then I became an agent myself, booking actors in film and television. And from there, I met Ashton Kutcher and I went to work for him for five years as his vice president of production. And we had three different arms of the company. Film, television, and then what we called at the time new media.

[Benedict Townsend]

It seems like Karen, along with Ashton, was way ahead of her time when it came to recognizing the winds of change that had come to her industry.

[Karen Spencer]

Courtesy of social media, because Ashton said, I'm pretty sure there's a way to make money on the Internet, but let's see if we can't crack that. And so we were doing all kinds of experimental content for the web. And then, of course, he decided to become the first person on Twitter to reach a million followers. And so he issued a challenge to cnn, who was right, about the same amount of followers at the time that he had something like 800,000. And he really wanted to show that with the Internet, one person could have as big of a platform as an entire company. And so I helped him with that campaign. We hit a million, and Twitter from then on became my absolute favorite social media platform.

[Benedict Townsend]

It's kind of mad now to think that this would have been so mind blowing, but in 2009, it was seismic. Karen was determined to blaze the trail of this new kind of media. She started work at an influencer agency called the Audience, which she says was the first ever.

[Karen Spencer]

And so, like, it was literally just early days. We had this really weird sort of like pipeline chart where we would go to brands and we would try to explain to them what influencer marketing was and how they could use it to their benefit.

[Benedict Townsend]

So, first of all, you know, before you joined vine, you were obviously very early on in that kind of influencer space. Do you remember the launch of Vine? Did you. Was that news at all for you? Did you think anything of it?

[Karen Spencer]

I do, actually, because at the time I was working as Tyra Banks, director of communications, and Tyra was really all about kind of being an early adopter. And so I. I mean, my memory tells me I could be wrong, but I have a very clear memory of being the person to record Tyra's first Vine. And I remember how, like, cheesy it was. So there was definitely an awareness for me of vine when it launched. And then, you know, we were working with a lot of Viners.

[Benedict Townsend]

But how was the traditional media old guard responding?

[Karen Spencer]

What I saw was an extreme allergy towards, quote, unquote, influencers that, you know, still exist, exists today in one form or another. The creator economy has been around long enough and it has proven itself to be quite, quite a powerful engine and a monetization machine, that it's really not disputable anymore that social media creators have and wield a lot of power. But in early days, I mean, it was just nothing but eye rolls in San Francisco and like, oh my God, who are these people on social media and why are they getting paid $100,000 for a 6 second ad? And, you know, there was. I very rarely ever heard someone supportive of it and not critical of it.

[Benedict Townsend]

When an opportunity to work directly with vine came up, it seemed like a clear match.

[Karen Spencer]

I heard that vine was looking for a head of creators and I went and interviewed with them. I was not really a user of vine at that time. I was definitely hiring and working with Vine Stars, so I was aware of it, but I. I didn't have that daily habit of being a Vine consumer, so I had to kind of like quickly get up to speed on that. And Twitter had a policy at the time that you'd be interviewed by like eight different people, and if you didn't get an enthusiastic yes and a thumbs up from everyone, then you wouldn't be hired. If even one person had a reservation, you wouldn't be hired. So I thought, never in my life have I had a group of eight people all enthusiastically like me. So this is not gonna happen. And I guess maybe because I just didn't even think it was possible, I didn't really go into the interviews with much fear or nervousness, and I was shortly hired thereafter.

[Brendan McNerney]

Wow.

[Benedict Townsend]

It's a miracle they hired anyone with that system. That is. That's crazy. In August 2015, Karen officially joined Vine HQ. And it wasn't just Karen who was new. The role she was taking, head of creative development, was also brand new. So were you the first person to have that role?

[Karen Spencer]

Yes. The founders of vine did not believe in social media influencers. When Vine Stars started becoming a thing, they were very resistant to it. And before I arrived at the company, there was a mandate that went out from them that no one was to talk to Vine Stars.

[Mary Goodheart]

This feels like one of those moments where it's worth us taking a pause because what Karen's just said is pretty big. No one from vine was allowed to talk to Vine Stars.

[Benedict Townsend]

Yeah, it seems at that time, Twitter basically had a hard line on how it dealt with creators, which is to say, to not deal with them at all.

[Mary Goodheart]

And, I mean, was that normal at the time?

[Benedict Townsend]

Absolutely not. You know, the approach of social media platforms traditionally to this day has always been actively courting creators all the time. YouTube was constantly crowing about like, we have so much money we can offer you from ads, like, please come and create. Because they understood that this is a symbiotic relationship. You need the platform, you need the creators, you need to guess along. You know, you can't take the creators for granted.

[Mary Goodheart]

I mean, it's. It's not even just social media. This. A lot of modern companies. Uber doesn't exist unless they have drivers. So Uber as a platform looks like it's all about trying to get customers who want a lift. But actually, a really important part of their strategy has to be still convincing drivers to secure their work through the Uber App. Same with Deliveroo. It only works if restaurants think that being on Deliveroo is going to be the best option for them to get more customers.

[Benedict Townsend]

Absolutely. You can take an approach of like, oh, well, there'll always be more creators. But also sometimes it's a bit of a quality over quantity thing. Like, you know, you've got a movie, you could cast Tom Hanks and you go, you know what, there's plenty of other actors. We'll just get another actor. And it's like, yeah, but that actor's not Tom Hanks doesn't have the pull. It's the same with these creators. You know, I think Twitter seemed to have this approach of like, creators are just like a naturally occurring resource that comes out the ground. We'll have so many of them and it'll be fine. But it's like, well, actually, if you want to succeed, you have to court the big players and you have to treat them with a modicum of respect. You have to acknowledge they exist. And where did that come from, that kind of resistance? Is it because they wanted it to be about just spontaneousness?

[Karen Spencer]

They wanted it to be democratized. And as soon as it became clear that there was going to be this sort of like high school situation where there were popular creators and mid level creators and all of that stuff was like disgusting to them. These were grown men. They didn't make an app for teenage humor content. They made an app for wanting it to be the sharing of art and ideas. And as soon as it turned into something that they didn't foresee, I think they were unhappy about it and continued to try and make moves to head it in the direction that they had had seen it going in, which, you know, is just impossible. You can't dictate the tides to the ocean. You can develop your product with a vision for what it's going to be. But as soon as that product gets in the hand of audiences, you no longer have the power or control to tell people how to use it.

[Benedict Townsend]

When I think of this period of Vine, I think of comedy skits, I think of the 1600 Viners, a spattering of generally offensive low brow humor. Turns out there was so much else going on, it just wasn't breaking through for users like me.

[Karen Spencer]

Like, I mean, the vine skateboarding content creation community was amazing. The art community was insane. Just really niche, small followed, but highly talented content producers. And so there was this, this vibe internally again, kind of like talking about how a product comes to life. But then the people behind the product want it to Be something else. Bian was continually moving more and more in the direction of like, low brow, not politically correct humor targeted for, let's say, 15 year olds, right? And then all of the quite serious intellectual and artistic employees of vine, they didn't want the company that they worked for to be that. So everybody there had their own little passion project and they were like developing, you know, how they could bring the skateboarding channel to more of an audience and how they could make the art channel pop off in a more popular way. And the thing is, 15 year olds just wanted like fart and dick jokes, you know, and that's what these like top Viners were giving them. People like King Batch, who was, when I came on board, the top Viner with the most loops and that's. That was what we called views. He had never been able to talk to anyone at vine before. He had sent just countless emails to the help center saying, like, hey, I'm your biggest Viner and I'm having some technical issues. Can you help me? Can you provide me some support? So when I met him, he said, oh, I thought vine just didn't like black people. And I said, no, no, vine just didn't like creators in general.

[Benedict Townsend]

Taylor Lorenz watched this play out. She says it wasn't just a matter of refusing to engage with the biggest creators. The founders were actively taking measures to try and suppress their influence.

[Taylor Lorenz]

The founders of vine really did not like the most successful creators on the app. Vine Source would get a little traction, have a little success, and then the management would come in and try and thwart them. Like, I mean, I use one example in my book where they rolled out these vanity URLs, which made it really easy. It would be, you know, previously was you would have the vine URL, like vine co slash a bunch of numbers, which made it hard to kind of share your vine handle. So they changed it to like vine code, you know, whatever username you wanted to pick. And they didn't give creators heads up about this at all. So of course, people essentially squatted on all these famous creators names. And then when the famous creators complained to vine and we're like, hey, can we have like, I'm Nash Greer. Can I have, you know, Vine Co Nash Grier? I have millions of followers. They intentionally said no to make things harder for the creators and to thwart discovery of the creators.

[Benedict Townsend]

It's crazy to me. Yeah, this was one of the revelations from your book, a revelation to me anyway, which is that I always associated vine with having like, no Algorithm, you know, no, they didn't mess with the feed. You know, it was kind of one of the last apps where they weren't actively messing with the feed. But as you say in your book, apparently they were basically secretly curating the popular feed by a certain point. Basically because they didn't like creators.

[Taylor Lorenz]

Yeah, the founders would constantly mess with the popular feed. So the popular feed, you would imagine would be reflective of the most popular content on the app. That was not true. A lot of the times the founders of vine would keep the most popular creators content off the popular feed because they just didn't approve of it. And then they would stack the popular feed with content that they approved of. And they were essentially trying to force feed content to their users, but it wasn't reflective of what was actually popular on the app. And so there was this disconnect. And I think it hurt engagement and also it made creators irate because they were like, you know, I know that my video meets the threshold to be on the popular page, and yet it's being excluded. And so they rightfully felt like vine was thwarting them again at every turn.

[Benedict Townsend]

Russ expectedly frames it a little differently.

[Russ Yusupov]

Yeah, unfortunately it became really difficult and tenuous because so much of the vine team was focused on how do we make Vine a platform for all types of content as opposed to just this, like, small collection of content categories, you know, 15 or 20 Viners. So I think internally there was that struggle, there was that tension. Some people thought that stop motion videos are more important. Others thought that music on vine was more important. Others thought that longer videos are going to be the key. And some thought, well, let's see what the vine creators want. These 15 people, like the vine mafia, if you will, they're going to stop posting if we don't give them what they want and champion their voices and their ideas and the features they wanted. Yeah, it just became just a whole bag of different opinions.

[Benedict Townsend]

Of course, we know that by now. For the 1600 Viners, this was about more than just having their popularity recognized. Vine was an integral part of their careers and their livelihoods. Brendan McNerney remembers when monetization opportunities became a core part of the vine experience without any involvement from the platform itself.

[Brendan McNerney]

The monetization experience became who's doing brand deals, like which friends, which finders are doing, how can I get tight with them, and how can I get them to intro me to those folks at the company? And that's really what it was. It was an isolating experience for creators like the first few years, you know, I'm not going to throw anybody under the bus, but the folks that were running creators at vine, they had an obvious favorite for artistic creators, Stop motion artists, people that did set design, musicians. I remember Trench was massive on Vine. He'd put the camera inside his acoustic guitar and you can see the vibrations of the strings. I would say there was a very New York City artistic community that's. Anybody that. That bled that vibe, I think was. Was a favorite, not comedy.

[Benedict Townsend]

Other creators we've spoken to have said this as well. They said it felt weird to them that they couldn't communicate easily with the people running the app that they were so successful on.

[Brendan McNerney]

To say that, like, I think Viners didn't feel heard is one thing, but I. I don't. There was, like, the thought that, like, the access to having a say or any impact on the platform was gatecast. And, like, even when I would go to VidCon and see some of the team members, they weren't approachable. Like, they clearly had favorites. And I think to run a platform, regardless of whether or not you like the content of somebody, you have to have somebody who appreciates the fact that you're doing it for the right reasons.

[Benedict Townsend]

Of course, effectively icing out a whole category of your most successful users has other side effects.

[Brendan McNerney]

If you wanted to have some discussion about vine or the future of vine or vent your frustrations, you would have to rely on other Viners. It ended up netting well because we had to build our own community, and it was so cool, so beautiful. I don't think TikTok has that, like, sure, people network, but, like, it was us against them, but also, you know, us begging them to help us. So, you know, it's like we were waging a war against the empire, but we were also asking the empire to, like, you know, release our paycheck here or something.

[Benedict Townsend]

You know, what those creators might not have appreciated at the time was that while they were asking the mighty empire for a paycheck, the mighty empire, apart from barely having two pennies to scrape together, also had its attention elsewhere because Vine's phenomenal growth had slowed and slowed. Karen had only been in her role for three weeks when she was explicitly told that the company was in major trouble.

[Karen Spencer]

Andre and maybe another leader from the company took me in a conference room and shut the door and said, we're in code red and that's why you're here. And Instagram had just launched video, and because of that, we were seeing Vine's activity decrease in an alarming fashion day over day. In fact, when I joined, there was like a digital board on the wall of the office that displayed all of the daily statistics about how many people were on the app. Like, daily active users, monthly active users. That board. The cord was pulled on that board pretty soon after I started because no one wanted to be broadcasting the truth about what was happening with the app. So it was a big code red situation. It was a founderless company at that point. There was a lot of sort of attempt at, like, power grabbing. You know, the top, top leader at every department was kind of making a play to be the general manager of the company. I think we had four different general managers while I was there, so there was no clear leadership, and there was always a lot of internal turmoil. But what everybody knew to be the truth was that vine had never monetized. Vine was an expensive app for Twitter to be carrying on their backs. You know, it was huge monthly cost to support that much streaming video at the time. And yet Twitter had never issued any kind of mandate about, like, hey, guys, you have six months to get your shit together and figure out how you're going to make money or anything like that. And so it was very amalgus in terms of what are we going to do to make money? How are we going to monetize this? Is there going to be ads? We talked about a tip jar, you know, all of the different ways that people now monetize on social platforms. There was daily conversation about what that plan was going to look like, but no clear decision on what was going to happen. And so we were just basically freeloading off of Twitter, you know, which could definitely have contributed to the fact that Twitter was hostile towards us and we were at an impasse.

[Benedict Townsend]

Vine is in code red, creators are mad, leadership is scrambling, and Twitter is treating vine like an UN unpaid intern.

[Karen Spencer]

It became really obvious as soon as I joined that vine was essentially the redheaded stepchild of Twitter.

[Benedict Townsend]

And yet, as the chaos mounted, vine had one last Hail Mary to play. Karen had a rescue plan that came in an unlikely disguise. A party, an invitation that promised to fix everything or blow it all apart.

[Brendan McNerney]

It was a bat signal to the creators that, like, they are now taken seriously. I think people are sticking around for a fork in the road.

[Benedict Townsend]

It was a very cool moment, but you could definitely tell there was some.

[Brendan McNerney]

Sort of hesitation, because it did feel.

[Benedict Townsend]

Very much like we need to show.

[Brendan McNerney]

Love to these Viners, even though they hate us.

[Benedict Townsend]

With more red flags than a Logan Paul apology video, this is the Freakout before the storm. You can listen to vine six Seconds that Changed the World on Global Player, download it from the App Store, or go to globalplayer.com vine 6 seconds that changed the World is a Global Original podcast created and hosted by me, Benedict Townsend and produced by my co creator Mary Goodheart, Narrative and creative by producer Kevia Cardoso, Score and sound design by Patrick Lee and mix by Chris James. Sophie Snelling is the Executive Producer, Al Riddell is Head of Factual Podcasts and Vicki Etchels is Director of Podcasts at Global this Is a Global Player Original Podcast.