{"id":4418,"date":"2026-07-26T12:06:52","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T12:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=4418"},"modified":"2026-07-26T12:06:52","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T12:06:52","slug":"vertical-video-tiktok-youtube-instagram-streaming-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=4418","title":{"rendered":"The vertical video takeover is here"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

This is <\/em>The Stepback<\/a>, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow <\/em>David Pierce<\/em><\/a>. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers\u2019 inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for <\/em>The Stepback here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form<\/a>, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea<\/a> of vertical video for years \u2014 they\u2019d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones won, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright<\/a>. That includes entertainment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It launched Stories in late 2013<\/a> as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to. CEO Evan Spiegel called it a \u201ctotally new way to share your day with friends \u2014 or everyone.\u201d It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most popular feature on Snapchat<\/a>. That\u2019s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly<\/a> into Instagram. Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, said of Spiegel and Snapchat that \u201cthey deserve all the credit\u201d for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air<\/a>. Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Stories weren\u2019t always video, but as cameras and upload speeds improved, video became the dominant medium in many ephemeral spaces. And video stories had two semi-magical properties: They were perfectly suited to endless, mindless scrolling, and they made it really easy to integrate ads. Only a few months after turning on Stories in Instagram, by which point half the platform\u2019s users were already using Stories, Facebook began flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive \u2014 you\u2019d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend\u2019s makeup routine, brunch pics, an ad for blush. Video ads felt more premium, took up the whole screen, and were thus far more lucrative for the social platforms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn\u2019t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform launched in the US in 2018, but had been popular for a few years in China as Douyin and elsewhere as Musical.ly. TikTok combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video easier than ever. It had filters like Instagram and Snapchat, but also supplied a steady stream of video ideas through the platform\u2019s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok also freed creators from caring about curating their profile or worrying about posting too much \u2014 you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that\u2019s what people did. Pretty quickly, TikTok became one of the fastest growing apps on the planet, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry. Instagram may have had more users, but TikTok users spent far more time TikToking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels launched in 2020 and became a core feature of both Instagram and Facebook; YouTube created Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had both launched and killed a similar feature called Fleets. By this point, this kind of full-screen, vertical-scrolling video was part of the lingua franca of the smartphone. At the same time, in a search for ever more engagement, these platforms were learning another lesson from TikTok: to stop relying on your friends to post interesting content, and instead to show you whatever the algorithm thinks you might like. Social networks were gone, replaced by social media \u2014 entertainment with a comments section.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024<\/a> that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and said in 2025 the feature was turning into a $50 billion annual business across Meta\u2019s apps. About 63 percent of young adults and teens are on TikTok, per Pew Research Center, and one in five teens reported being on the app \u201calmost constantly.\u201d YouTube reported 200 billion daily views<\/a> of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The last three or four years have been about relentless standardization in social media. The pace with which these products copy each other, and regress back toward parity, has been absolutely astonishing. First, Shorts and Reels both aped TikTok\u2019s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok\u2019s idea of prioritizing content over connection \u2014 followers are dead, long live the algorithm. TikTok pushed hard into shopping, then suddenly Reels and Shorts became a lot more shoppable. YouTube began to grow on TVs, and suddenly TikTok and Instagram started investing in its own TV apps. Videos got longer and longer across platforms, to allow more ads. All the apps got really into livestreaming for a while. And micro dramas<\/a>. They\u2019ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm<\/a>, and small things like Clear Mode<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

As the social platforms spin endlessly around each other, they\u2019ve gotten some surprising company. Company after company started to notice their content floating around social media platforms, often in dubiously legal ways<\/a>, and tried to take some of the watch time for themselves. Spotify decided it, too, wanted to be a video service<\/a>, and built a vertical-scrolling feed for users to explore. Disney built a TikTok clone for ESPN and another for Disney Plus<\/a>, both called Verts. Netflix<\/a>, Prime Video<\/a>, and Paramount Plus<\/a> all called their clones Clips.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

There are two reasons for the ongoing onslaught of short-form vertical video: time spent and advertising. The endlessly scrolling video feed turns out to be one of the most engrossing forms of entertainment ever devised (to the point that it has become a regulatory problem for the social platforms), and in a relentless competition for eyeballs and attention, it has become everyone\u2019s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player<\/a> to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Meanwhile, as those platforms have captured more of our time and attention, short-form video has become a dominant force of advertising on the internet, which means advertisers are already comfortable making ads designed to go between videos in the feed. And as so many companies turn to AI to do their ad targeting, all they really need is the creative to get started. \u201cSo long as clients give us different assets \u2014 a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad \u2014 AI is essentially powering everything else,\u201d YouTube\u2019s Brian Albert told me last year<\/a>. \u201cFrom the audiences you\u2019re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that\u2019s actually showing.\u201d The combination of AI and vertical video has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more it wins, the easier it becomes for everyone else to get on board, and so it just keeps winning.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It\u2019s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more <\/em>short-form and vertical, since those short videos are easier to make and easier to load into endlessly scrolling feeds. Video services used to require you to pick something and press play, but now all they need is for you to open the app and they can start showing you ads. They\u2019re not going to want to go back. Here\u2019s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version<\/a> of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook \u2014 only Reels. After all this time, they\u2019ve trained users to want and expect this kind of fast-paced, instant-gratification entertainment, to the point where even a full-length movie can feel like a chore.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Meanwhile, after years of raising prices, streaming services around the world are hoping they can turn to advertising to keep growing. For a while, they could coast on the back of linear TV, borrowing those ads to run on digital platforms. But a TikTok ad won\u2019t make any sense on Netflix, so Netflix decided the best thing to do is build something that looks more like TikTok. A recent HubSpot report<\/a> found that short-form video was by a wide margin both the most-used and most successful form of marketing content in 2025, and that it was the format in which marketers planned to invest the most this year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

All that said, there are glimmers of a bigger shift beginning to happen. Fed up with the algorithm, some users are starting to demand the return of friends and family in social media. But more broadly, more and more young people are deciding to put down their phones, resist the invasion of AI<\/a> into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year\u2019s most exciting new phones is a flip phone. As long as we live in this era of social media and entertainment, vertical video is going to win. It would take a cultural revolution to stop it \u2014 and there might just be one brewing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n