Vine might be coming back to life, so what does this mean for creatives?

The internet moves fast, but nostalgia moves faster.

Rob Mayhew made quite the claim at the Australian media and marketing conference Mumbrella360 this week, which sent ripples through creative circles: “Vine is coming back.” 

But don’t take that as an official announcement, though it is a very definitive statement by the man, adding fuel to the fire of potential Vine resurrection that has long been burning in Elon Musk’s continued hints on X.

Earlier this year, Musk said “We’re looking into it,” on the topic of bringing back Vine. 

And back in 2022, he tweeted a poll with the simple question: “Bring back Vine?” To which 69.6% of respondents voted yes.

So, yeah, this potential revival has been brewing for a while.

Anyway, you remember Vine, right? That fun little video app Twitter bought in 2012 for $30 million months before it even launched, convinced we’d all want to watch six-second loops until our eyes bled. Well, they were right on that front. By 2015, the platform had around 200 million active users. 

But then Instagram got jealous, TikTok became a thing, Vine stars started abandoning ship to platforms that would actually pay them, and Twitter pulled the plug in 2016.

Now, almost a decade after its death, Vine’s ghost is calling…

Here’s where it gets spicy. TikTok has been playing chicken with the US government all year. On January 17, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban, and the app went dark for 12 hours. Trump swooped in with a 75-day reprieve, which then got extended by a further 75 days. 

This second extension pushes the deadline to June 19, although last month, Trump indicated he would be willing to extend the deadline again if necessary, stating, “If an extension is required, I would be open to providing it” during an NBC News interview.

So, in other words, TikTok isn’t exactly the most stable of places right now.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs estimates that the creator economy could approach half a trillion dollars by 2027, doubling its value in 2023. That’s a lot of zeros for something boomers still think is playing on their phones.

So, while the world might be in quite a chaotic state, the creator economy is thriving. YouTube Shorts has surpassed 90 billion daily views. Instagram Reels boasts 726.8 million active users per month. Everyone’s scrambling for a piece of the short-form pie, and now Vine may want back in the bakery.

So, what should creators and brands do with this information? Mayhew’s take at Mumbrella360 was blunt: “Don’t just wait for it to come back, start thinking about it right now,” he said. “People are craving community, Gen Z in particular, and people with similar opportunity, and this is a perfect opportunity for brands.” 

He’s not wrong. The platforms that win aren’t the ones with the best features — they’re the ones that shape culture before culture knows what hit it.

Think about what made Vine special. It wasn’t the technology. Six seconds? That’s barely enough time to sneeze. But constraints breed creativity. While YouTube was busy with 10-minute vlogs and Instagram was perfecting the Valencia filter, Vine creators were inventing a new language. Loops within loops. Punchlines that hit before you realized there was a setup.

The platform birthed careers, memes, and an entire comedy ecosystem that still influences how we create today. Every perfectly-timed TikTok transition? Every engaging Instagram Reel that cuts on the beat? That’s Vine’s DNA, mutated and spread across the internet like a benevolent virus.

Don’t keep scrolling. Watch the above. All 12 and a half minutes. Enjoy it. It was beautiful. What a truly wonderful, glorious, excellent time it was. Ah well, sunrise, sunset.

But also come back when you’re done, because we’re not done yet.

So what happens if Vine actually comes back? Glad you asked!!

First, understand what we’re dealing with. The short-form video space is already crowded. YouTube Shorts has more than 2 billion monthly users. Instagram Reels play more than 200 billion videos daily across Meta’s empire. TikTok, despite its death threats, still commands the culture. Into this steps… a six-second loop machine. 

Yes, the space is saturated, but it’s saturated with platforms trying to do everything. A platform that does one thing perfectly — six-second loops — could carve out a distinct niche, especially if TikTok remains unstable.

Titillating prospect, isn’t it? Will it fail, or would it hit those nostalgia buttons in our brain goo and soar higher than ever before? Perhaps most importantly — and much more predictably — its rebirth would be a reset button on creative constraints.

TikTok gave us three minutes, then ten. Instagram Reels extended to three minutes. YouTube Shorts also decided they liked that three-minute number and did the same. Everyone’s been stretching, expanding, adding time… as if any of us have any more to waste!!!

Not Vine though. Vine says: six seconds. Take it or leave it. And if it returns and if it holds true to this philosophy (two big ifs, I know), we could be on for something truly fascinating.

See, any creative will tell you, constraint can be good. Maybe that’s a cope; perhaps I have internalised my own struggles with creative freedom. But think about that tricky brief you stared at for a few minutes (or a few days), thinking How The Hell Will I Ever Make This Work. And boom, it hits — an idea you might never have had were you not so squeezed so tightly into a box; were your back not so firm against the wall that you could feel it in every vertebra. 

The current platforms reward padding. The hook, the build, the payoff, the call-to-action. Vine’s resurrection would demand distillation. No room for “wait for it” videos. No space for lengthy tutorials. Just pure, concentrated creativity. Kind of like what haikus did to 17th-century Japan, I imagine.

But here’s where it gets tricky. Vine 2.0 can’t just be Vine 1.0 with better servers. The magic isn’t in recreating 2016 Vine exactly — it’s in applying that constraint-driven creativity to today’s creator economy infrastructure. The internet has evolved. Creators have evolved. The economy around creation has evolved.

In 2016, Vine died partly because it couldn’t figure out monetization. Creators fled to platforms that paid. Now we live in a world where creators of YouTube Shorts can earn between 1 cent and 7 cents for every 1,000 views through the platform’s revenue-sharing program launched in 2023. TikTok has replaced its old Creator Fund with the Creator Rewards Program, offering significantly better rates of $0.50 to $1 per 1,000 views for qualifying content. Instagram discontinued its Reels Play bonuses in 2023, but creators can now monetize through the Instagram Gifts feature, where fans send ‘Stars’ worth 1 cent each — so get 100 stars from a fan and boom, one whole dollar baby. 

So, yeah, none of the above is life-changing for a single video (unless you really strike gold, but even then, the real money comes from what happens after virality). Given the above, the bar for competitive creator compensation isn’t actually that high. Vine wouldn’t need to revolutionize payouts; it would need to match these modest industry standards that didn’t exist in 2016.

The modern creator economy operates on direct platform payments, brand partnerships, and diversified revenue streams that simply didn’t exist during Vine’s original run. If Vine returns without solving the fundamental monetization problem that killed it the first time — and without offering competitive creator compensation — it’s dead on arrival. Nostalgia doesn’t pay rent, but sustainable creator economics do.

Here’s where things could really shake up: Platform fatigue is real, but Vine’s return could actually simplify things for some creators.

Right now, creators are already exhausted. They’re reformatting content for each platform, chasing algorithms, trying to be everywhere at once. Add Vine to the mix? That’s another format, another audience, another set of rules to master. How many straws did it take to break the camel’s back again? 

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the era of the “everywhere creator” is ending. Maybe we’re heading toward specialization. The TikTok creators stay on TikTok. The YouTube folks focus on Shorts (or four-hour reviews of Star Wars-themed hotels that hoover up 13 million views). And Vine? Vine becomes the home for a specific type of creator — the ones who think in loops, find freedom in constraint, and can tell a story in six seconds flat.

In short, is Vine coming back? Maybe. Should you be thinking about its potential return? Absolutely.

Mayhew said brands need to start thinking about Vine now. And he’s right on two levels. First, the practical plane — it’s just plain smart to stay one step ahead of the market and plan for its expected (and unexpected) evolutions.

But he’s also right in a more abstract way. Telling us to think about Vine now is also challenging us to think a little differently from our current status quo, to play with the idea — what could you do with just 6 seconds? 

Why wait for a platform to limit you to 6 seconds when you could, you know, just do that now?

In any case, discussions of the potential return of Vine always triggers mass nostalgia online. The prospect of getting another Why you always lying? or Road work ahead? Uh yeah, I sure hope it does is fun and exciting, but it also teleports us back to a simpler time.

Maybe the prospect of Vine’s return represents something bigger: a hunger for simplicity in an increasingly complex creative landscape. A desire for some form of predictable comfort in a rocking sea of endless possibility. 

But creating shouldn’t rely on which platform is the ‘it’ platform of the day. The creators who thrived when Vine died were the ones who understood that platforms are just tools. They built audiences, not follower counts. They created styles, not just content. They made stuff that mattered beyond the loop.

If Vine returns, it may flop, it may pop, or it may hit that middle ground and become just another platform in the toolbox. But don’t wait for it to live or die to define what you do next. 

Right, I’m off to bother everyone in the office by repeating Daaaaaamn Daniel until security escorts me out.

All this Vine talk got you feeling creative? We’ve got you covered. Start with a scroll through video templates, grab the perfect sound effect, layer on some music, and finish strong with slick stock footage. And if you’re feeling particularly imaginative, why not create something truly unique with the help of our full AI stack.

Feature image made using our ImageGen.