Lele Pons Was Vine's Most Followed Woman: How a Rumor About Its Shutdown Helped Her Maintain Relevance Long After (Exclusive)

Lele Pons Was Vine's Most Followed Woman: How a Rumor About Its Shutdown Helped Her Maintain Relevance Long After (Exclusive) https://ift.tt/I4QsGWM

The 28-year-old influencer looks back on the defunct app that launched her career while she was still in high school

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Lele Pons in October 2024.

It often feels like social media has opened up the doors to fame to anyone, anywhere. On the likes of TikTok and Instagram, influencers and everyday users have a shot at gaining notoriety by playing to the perks of an algorithm.

But it wasn't always so easy to ride social media to the top, not for an "OG," as former Vine star Lele Pons considers herself. She was only a teenager in high school in Miami when she started investing her time and energy into building a future on the app.

"I had a lot of videos because I never skipped a day. I was obsessed with posting every day," Pons, now 28, tells PEOPLE exclusively. "[Vine] was my first social media. I was not on Facebook, YouTube. I was on nothing."

She didn't talk in her videos but rather managed to squeeze a flash of physical comedy into each clip, managing to get laughs while sticking to Vine's six-second length limit on videos. The Venezuelan creator became the first Vine star to hit a billion views, or "loops," as they were dubbed on the app. Pons emerged as one of the earlier major teen creators, so she commanded the younger demographic.

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Lele Pons presenting at the Shorty Awards in April 2016.

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With 11 million fans, Pons became the most followed female creator on Vine, but her reign was short-lived. On Jan. 17, 2017, the video app shuttered, leaving many users without a home for their content. But Pons wasn't willing to lose what she'd earned on Vine, especially since she came up during such a formative period in her own life.

"I joined Vine in the first place because I was really bad at school and nothing was really working," she recalls. A friend told her about the app, and she saw how creative the videos were. That ingenuity resonated with her longtime love of storytelling. She felt she could relate to people making Vines more than she could relate to her fellow high school students.

"I used to play a lot with Barbies until I was 13, and I would make stories with them, and I was just like, why not just do [Vine]," she shares. "I really didn't relate to anybody in my high school. What they wanted to do is not what I want to do. So I [started] doing storytelling through these videos."

After Vine's end, Pons managed to carry her fan base elsewhere, mainly because she'd paid attention to early swirling rumors of Vine's end about a year before it actually closed.

Lele Pons/Instagram

Lele Pons in August 2023.

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Other comedians and entertainers weren't so lucky, in part due to the fact that they had no real predecessors in the social media space. Vine was an early iteration of short-form videos online, something wholly unlike YouTube with its lengthier content. It was new to everyone, including Pons, and she says it was initially somewhat disorienting to build a fan base with those types of videos.

"Right now, if you go viral, you can have other people as example of like, 'Oh, this is how your life is going to change. This is what you can do.' We didn't know anything," she tells PEOPLE.

During Vine's heyday, Instagram launched a video platform, which Pons latched onto as a "backup" plan in case she needed to switch platforms. Though that ended up being the case, she never needed to switch niches. The physical comedy clips played well — and continue to play well — beyond Vine, and Pons believes she was able to maintain a particularly international audience because she didn't speak in videos.

Some ex-Viners struggled to stretch their content beyond six seconds and fumbled the ample time offered on YouTube and even Instagram. Pons never had an issue breaking through the limit; in fact, she felt more freedom than ever before.

"If you can make something in [five or six] seconds, it's amazing for you. It's starting in a little house and then going to a mansion. You have so much space," she explains. "Starting from five minutes and being like, 'Oh my God, how do I put this five minutes into six seconds?' That's impossible."

Lele Pons/Instagram

Lele Pons in Brazil in January 2024.

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Where she thrived, others failed: "I just think that many people didn't transform. They didn't evolve into doing other things in other platforms. They just really put all their efforts into Vine and they didn't split their time," she notes. "I did."

At the time, Pons would post a Vine and then immediately share it on her Instagram. Today, she does that same dance between Instagram — where she has 53.6 million followers — and the latest platform with no guarantees: TikTok. She hopes newer creators follow her lead and learn from her success. She's seen this before, and she knows you have to prepare for anything.

"You cannot depend on one app," says Pons, who competed on season 32 of Dancing with the Stars. "That's why I go to other places ... YouTube is amazing, a podcast is great, Snapchat — everything works."

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Thanks to her start on Vine and continued wins elsewhere, the creator has been able to break into Hollywood, just as some of her friends and former Vine contemporaries have, like King Bach. Eventually, however, Pons would like to stop relying on any apps as her primary form of storytelling and take her talents to the big screen.

"I think I would love to direct big movies or work in the film industry because I've always loved that part," she tells PEOPLE. "I've done music. I've done hosting ... I've done a documentary, YouTube. I like the entertainment world, but I want to direct [a movie]. I want to be 100% behind it. I don't want to be in it."

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Lele Pons on 'Dancing with the Stars' in 2023.

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Pons says her background can play to her advantage or disadvantage as she tries to further break into the more traditional side of the industry, depending on the situation. In her experience, people can be quick to reject social media as a way to become famous.

"I feel like people see it sometimes as a cheat," she explains. "The reputation is not the best, but it is also an advantage because you have eyes on you. So if you do a really good job, that's amazing."

She does think starting out on Vine gives her a little more credibility than other creators. She and her fellow Vine stars started with very little insight about their futures, and they helped shape the creator space into what it is today.

"Vine was a platform that is like an OG," Pons continues. "When you're an OG, people respect you because they're like, 'Damn, she's [from] a long time ago. She's not a newbie. When social media wasn't a thing, she was there.'"

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Lele Pons at the 2024 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in N.Y.C. on Oct. 15, 2024.

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As an added benefit, Pons stands out as a nostalgic figure for those who used the app in the 2010s.

"When people grow up with you, they have a little bit more respect," she says. "I was at the right time in the right place. That's something that you can't really replace. You can replace many things, but you can't be replaced being a nostalgic or childhood person for someone. You can't."