The seven-second video app may be dead, but its best clips are having a resurgence on YouTube. What does it mean for creators?

Helena Hadjiyerou, a 21-year old from the United Kingdom, operates one of the many microscopic channels bobbing around YouTube’s vast, untamed network. For the most part she posts three-minute missives where she gossips about her neighbors or shows off her thrift store finds, and each of them earns a small 100-or-so views. The one exception is the file she uploaded in December.

It’s a compilation of her favorite Vines – relics from the now-defunct social media platform where teens performed seven-second one-act-plays for the world. The video unfolds like a millennial highlight reel of memes and punchlines lovingly ingrained in any web-literate kid’s cultural experience. She called it “Vines that were there for me when no one else was”, and it’s so far generated a mammoth 2.4m views.

That number is insanely high for an unknown channel, but not unprecedented when compared to other Vine compilations milking nostalgia for the platform. To date, more than 16 million people have watched “Vines that cured my cancer”; more than 13 million people clicked on “Vines that cured my depression”; and a ridiculous 20 million views are attached to “Vines that keep me alive”.



To be clear, Vine’s services were officially shuttered only 18 months ago, not long enough, surely, for it to be missed so acutely. But Hadjiyerou still describes her relationship with the platform the same way a Generation X-er opines over MTV’s heyday.

“I think part of the reason we love [Vine] so much is because they feel like an inside joke that most of our generation is in on,” she explains, when I reach her over Twitter. “Something that we bonded over.” I suppose everything, even nostalgia, is accelerated in the internet age.

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This is a blessing and a curse for the original generation of Viners. Videos like Hadjiyerou’s certainly keep their golden era alive, but they’re still cribbing property that doesn’t belong to them. Hadjiyerou told me she received dozens of Content ID claims from the creators of the Vines she featured – all hoping to siphon off any ad winnings her 2.4 million views generated. (“It’s a good way to get views,” she explains, diplomatically, as she reflects on her anthology’s popularity. “But not a good way to make money!”)

Gabe Gundacker has gone a step further. As one of Vine’s first, and best visionaries, his clips are routinely uploaded onto YouTube without his knowledge or approval. So he signed up for a service called Collab, which recognizes his Vines as intellectual property, and automatically scans YouTube to scrape up any ad revenue they accrue, regardless of what channel they’re hosted on.

“I get a check each month for Vines I made three years ago,” he tells me. “Vine residuals. It’s insane.” (Gundacker won’t get specific about how much he’s pulling from those residuals, but does say that they’ve gone up “considerably” now that YouTube is the only place to watch Vine.)

Gundacker believes Vine’s bizarre afterlife can be blamed on a bit of historical erasure. The platform was occasionally hilarious when it was alive, he said, but it was also clogged with plenty of boring, bland chaff. But now, Vine’s mediocre moments have been effectively forgotten, filtered out of the cultural canon. “These compilations make it seem like Vine was this haven of weird, experimental short form videos,” he continued. “In reality, you had to sift through a lot of garbage to find those videos, and I think if they brought Vine back, that would be the first repressed memory viewers would have to confront.”

That resurrection isn’t impossible. A group of Silicon Valley investors have recently tried, in fits and starts, to breath new life into the mercurial video-sharing platform under the rather uninspired name “Vine 2”. It’s easy to see why; people clearly love and miss Vine, and it seems possible to morph that mournfulness into a profit. But Hadjiyerou still thinks it would be a mistake.

“If a Vine 2.0 came around it would have the exact same fate as the original one,” she said. “Maybe even more short-lived.”

At a time when social media symbolizes the most dysfunctional parts of our world, Vine is held up by some as an unabashed force for good. Perhaps that is because it was cut down in its prime, before the internet’s dark corners got a hold of it.

Now they live on in YouTube compilations, like museum artifacts, a memento of a simpler time. Or more specifically, 2015.

“Vine is dead,” Gundacker added. “It’s hard to be cynical about the dead.”