DiVine, Vine’s spiritual successor, won’t rule out ads

While DiVine is not officially affiliated with Vine, it is something of a spiritual successor to it. Users of it still watch six-second looping videos, plus there’s a “classic” tab where they can browse more than two million original Vine clips the team managed to bring back from the dead. That recovery process was tricky. Volunteers had saved Vine’s old footage years ago in a vast oddly-packaged data files. Rabble had to vibe code his own program to crack them open and match each video back up with its original likes and comments.

The way new videos work is different from Vine, though. Users can’t just upload any clip. They have to either record it live inside the app or the app checks a kind of digital paper trail attached to the file, called a C2PA, that shows whether it came from a camera or an AI tool. If it looks AI-made, it gets blocked. 

Whether that proposition has time to cut through is another question. Rich as Dorsey is, DiVine will need a durable business model if it’s going to stand out from the pack of platforms that have tried to position themselves against whatever tech villain is fashionable at the moment. 

“We’re still working through all that,” said Alice Chan, CMO of DiVine, when talking about how the app intends to make money in the longer term. “It costs money to run these apps, so we will need to raise some money most likely, and then also generate revenue.” 

One option, Chan mentioned, was providing services which she said will roll out “over the next coming months”. The other, and arguably more important one, is advertising. 

“We’re certainly not closed to ads, but we’re not looking for brands to go, here’s a six-second version of my 22-second version that appeared somewhere else,” Chan said. “As far as we can, we want to avoid that ‘trap’ of being in that monoculture of a single ad algorithm, which is what has rewarded all the negative behavior on social media, because those platforms really just reward engagement.”

That’s also the exact mechanic that made those platforms so appealing to advertisers in the first place. The DiVine team knows it. Building a model that resists that pull while still making money is the harder problem, and it’s not clear yet what the answer looks like. What’s interesting is that DiVine is going to try and find an answer anyway. Upstart social platforms tend to rule out ads loudly, then quietly reverse course once the path to profitability gets hard.

For now, the pitch to brands is native content made for DiVine not repurposed ad creative. Taco Bell, for instance, is already on board with a throwback campaign in the U.S. It brings back four discontinued menu items for a limited period, that were originally available in 2016 as part of its latest “Decades #TBTB Menu” campaign. As part of the partnership, the fast food chain is promoting DiVine across its app, TV advertising and email campaigns, while giving its users codes to access the platform ahead of its public launch. Chan said the company is already in talks with others but wouldn’t name names or specify timings. She did, however, point to Home Depot’s old Vine presence as the kind of brand content she’d like to see come back. The videos were characterized by absurd, deadpan and often satirical humor shot inside the warehouse aisles of the retailer. 

Nostalgic as it is, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility, especially given the app’s stance on AI.

“If DiVine has a strong stance as a platform that explicitly bans AI and with no ads, that could be appealing,” said Samshul Chowdhury, svp of paid media at Zeno Group. “Vine also has a ton of positive brand equity and I’m sure they can lean into that for the renaissance of DiVine. My biggest questions and concerns are: how can they properly police AI since it is so rampant? And how can they sustain without an ad supported model?”

Whatever those answers are, creators will factor into them both. To them, DiVine is pitching itself less as another destination to chase reach and more as an alternative place to build an audience. The company is in contact with some of the original Vine creators whose videos have been restored to the platform, while also trying to attract newer creators looking for somewhere to experiment.

“We don’t have a massive audience to offer them [yet],” Chan said. “But creators are increasingly looking for new places to grow”, she added, particularly as it has become harder to build audiences on established platforms. So while they won’t be using it as a core money spinner anytime soon, it could work as a place to test new ideas, drive audiences to other platforms through links, or use the six-second format as a way to tease longer-form content elsewhere.

That could become even more appealing since creators theoretically have more control on DiVine. Unlike other social networks, DiVine is built on the Nostr protocol — a decentralized technology, similar to what the likes of Mastodon and Bluesky were built on — rather than a walled garden such as Instagram or TikTok. It means dDVine (in theory) shouldn’t suffer the same fate as Vine did and get shut down by a corporation.

“Creators can view stats. There’s likes. They can see how many loops have played, and there are other analytics features that we might be able to roll out over time,” said Chan.