Swear, almost 30% of all weekly Social Media news always has something about Twitter. Here’s the latest – is Twitter looking to bring back Fleets and, perhaps more importantly, Vine? Chief Twit Elon Musk has long hinted at bringing back both elements in some form. Recently, Musk has again suggested that Fleets, Vine, and Periscope will be ‘resurrected’ at some point.

The Revival

It’s hard to imagine them being a big hit, seeing as how they were all eventually retired due to either poor or declining performance. Fleets immediately sank because it wasn’t as popular as similar formats back then, while Vine was forced out of the market because of past Twitter management’s ability to give it greater boons for creators. The idea here is that people really want them back, despite never really being major elements, maybe except for Vine.

Vine did become huge, at some point, and with TikTok’s rise, many now lament Twitter’s decision to abandon the app – because it could have been Twitter that would now be captivating billions of users. But it couldn’t. At its peak, Vine had around 200 million users in 2015. Granted, that’s in relative terms – Twitter itself had only just 305 million total users at the time. The problem for Twitter then was generating revenue from Vine. Even now, no platform has cracked the code to monetizing short-form videos, and that eventually forced the top Vine creators to seek better opportunities elsewhere.

Maybe things will be different under Musk? The guy’s at least looking for more ways to monetize various elements in the app, with a view of incentivizing creators to focus more of their energy on Tweets. Fleets were similar – Fleets seem to have had a niche following of Twitter users who were passionate about the feature, but Twitter’s explanation when it was shut down in 2021 gives the idea that this niche following lacked the weight of support needed to keep the feature.

So, it wasn’t like either of these features was popular, as such – while Periscope was launched to big hype amid the live-stream boom in 2015, before gradually petering out due to lack of audience interest.

The Wrap

Again, however, with Musk’s renewed focus on creators and providing a broader toolset for users to create and share all types of content with their audience, maybe there’s a new fit for each – maybe then, Twitter will look to raise these forgotten offers as Twitter Blue exclusives, or subscriber-only tools, thus further incentivizing subscription activity.

It could be that Musk’s also just saying things. There aren’t really any new indicators right now, and with Twitter’s engineering team stripped bare, as in bones, it’s hard to imagine Twitter launching any major new updates at this stage. But this is also perceptual. Maybe Twitter is working on bringing these back? 

Sources

https://bit.ly/3LCAdMz