Sources: Twitter is currently vetting multiple term sheets from firms offering to buy Vine; one source says some offers are lower than $10M
Vine may survive after all. Twitter is currently vetting multiple term sheets from companies offering to buy Vine, and hopes to make a deal soon, multiple sources tell TechCrunch.
Context & Ripple Effects
Vine has been on the block since September, when sources reported Twitter's board would meet to weigh selling or trimming assets including MoPub and Vine ([[a:874168]]). Subsequent reporting detailed why: Vine failed to monetize, lost ground to Instagram and Snapchat, churned through executives, and offered no clear strategic benefit to Twitter ([[a:876883]]).
Today's news is the price discovery moment — multiple firms have submitted term sheets, and at least one source says some offers sit under $10M. That is a strikingly low figure for a consumer app Twitter acquired in 2012, and it frames whether Vine gets sold or wound down.
First-order effects
- Twitter gains a path to shed an unmonetizing property quickly, converting a strategic liability into cash — albeit potentially single-digit-millions of it — while bidders get a recognized short-video brand and its user base at distressed pricing.
Second-order effects
- Sub-$10M bids reset expectations for what second-tier social video properties fetch when Facebook-owned Instagram and Snapchat own the format, pressuring other mid-size apps facing the same competitive squeeze.
Third-order effects
- The eventual outcome — Vine was shut down in 2016 and reduced to a video archive of posts from 2013 through 2017 — suggests acquirers saw more value in the content than the product, yet the brand kept enough pull that Elon Musk later ordered engineers to build a Vine reboot. The pattern points toward big platforms treating standalone video apps as disposable rather than sellable assets.
The trend: Standalone short-video apps are being repriced from strategic acquisitions to near-writeoff divestitures as platforms like Instagram and Snapchat absorb the format.