Twitter’s video-looping platform Vine serves as home to a barrage of top influencers and homegrown talent. Like their YouTube counterparts, Vine stars are increasingly getting acceptance from the mainstream, but they feel like they are being shortchanged when it comes to their original content. So they have decided to approach Twitter with the matter.
Vine creators threatening to exit
Late last year, executives from Vine and Twitter had a secret meeting where Vine’s aggrieved talents were also present. Discussing payment solutions for Vine creators was the main agenda of the gathering, BuzzFeed reported. Twitter is already waging an internal battle to retain staff, and chances are it may face an exodus on this other important front too.
Twitter does offer some revenue opportunities for video creators, such as brand-related sponsorship and advertising schemes, but the company has yet to offer a direct revenue component for Vine that’s similar to YouTube’s monetization program. Since the meeting though, the micro-blogging firm has been considering the idea of doing just that.
A Vine user who attended the meeting said that all that the video creators want is “fair treatment.”
“Right now they are trying to figure this out,” the person said.
YouTube, Facebook more lucrative than Twitter
YouTube and Facebook are either already or are pushing ahead with monetization programs for creators and publishers, and this seems to go against Twitter. A Vine user clearly said that users of the service have other options available to them.
Speaking to BuzzFeed, he said, “Three and a half years is a long time to have us posting on your platform for free. We’ve had a lot of our top creators find a lot of successes on YouTube, a lot of success on Facebook right now.”
Similar problems but different solutions
Similar to Twitter, Vine has a major gulf between its top creators, i.e., the influencers, who are at the top of the hierarchy and boast of having the largest number of followers and highest engagement rates, and its remaining base of 200 million users.
Lately, Twitter has been making sincere efforts to attract new users to its service, but the results have been mixed. However, it is not possible for it to do the same for Vine and certainly not at the expense of the platform’s biggest stars.
