When Twitter announced last month that it was shutting down Vine and with it cutting 9% of its workforce there were a number of loyal users that were a little bit crushed. While the service lost Twitter money, it appears it may enjoy a second life as TechCrunch reported Monday that Twitter is shopping the six-second video service to about five possible buyers including Japan’s Line messaging service.
Twitter didn’t quite kill Vine
When Twitter made the announcement in late October, the company was clear that existing Vines would remain available for download as well as viewing. Regarding the sale of Vine, TechCrunch cited an unnamed source that said that all of the roughly five bids came in at less than $10 million. That’s hardly a windfall for the struggling company that has seen a number of companies including Salesforce, which recently decide not to purchase the micro-blogging platform that revolutionized how we communicate with its original 140 character posts.
In early October, The New York Times reported that Salesforce might be by the company and that getting rid of Vine would save the company about $10 million a month operating the short video service.
When the TechCrunch report came out yesterday, Twitter who was asked to comment prior to publication declined to do so.
Following the TechCrunch report, USA Today reached out to the company and was also met with no new information.
“We don’t comment on rumor or speculation,” Twitter spokeswoman Brielle Villablanca said in an email to the newspaper.
Given the reported costs of operating Vines, $10 million a month, any purchase would have to be made by a company with pretty deep pockets as it seems to be a losing proposition and one that would require a real surprise run of the service to actually see it make money something that its present ownership has clearly never been able to do.
There is also an inherent danger is selling Vine. If someone, however unlikely, were able to turn the service around into profitability it would certainly not reflect well on Twitter.
