Vertical Video Takes Over as Mobile-First Media Reshapes the Internet

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Not so long ago, the major social media and entertainment platforms felt distinct from one another. YouTube was where people watched clips from TV shows and movies, and where a fast-growing creator class began to take shape. Instagram was, above all else, a photo app. Netflix was chasing the idea of becoming an on-demand HBO. Facebook revolved around friends and family. Twitter was the place for breaking news and public conversation. Snapchat, at least at first, was a messaging app.

But they were all being shaped by the same force: the smartphone. As billions of people came online for the first time, they began creating for the narrow, upright screens already in their hands. The selfie became a vertical format partly because it filled a phone display more naturally, and partly because holding a phone upright to take a picture was simply easier. For years, plenty of people dismissed vertical video, arguing that human vision is horizontal and that upright clips looked awkward on widescreen laptops. In the end, the phone settled the debate. We hold our phones vertically, so the experiences built for them became vertical too — including entertainment.

As it often did in that era, Snap saw the shift early. In late 2013, the company introduced Stories as a looser, more casual way to follow what friends were doing throughout the day. CEO Evan Spiegel described it as a “totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” Users embraced it quickly, and by mid-2014 Stories had become Snapchat’s most popular feature. That kind of momentum rarely escapes Mark Zuckerberg’s attention. By August 2016, Instagram had adopted a near-identical version of the feature. Kevin Systrom, then Instagram’s CEO, said Spiegel and Snapchat “deserve all the credit” for Stories. The message was clear enough: Stories were no longer just a Snapchat idea. They had become a format. Soon, versions of Stories appeared on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and across much of the internet.

Stories were not always video-first, but better cameras and faster mobile uploads pushed them in that direction. Video Stories had two powerful advantages for social platforms: they encouraged effortless, endless tapping and scrolling, and they made advertising feel native to the experience. Only a few months after Instagram rolled out Stories — at a point when roughly half of its users were already using the feature — Facebook began adding ads aggressively. The mixed, unpredictable rhythm of Stories helped soften the interruption. A dog photo, a hiking video, an ad for jeans, a friend’s makeup routine, brunch pictures, an ad for blush — it all blended together. Full-screen video ads also looked more polished, commanded the entire display, and generated more revenue for the platforms selling them.

Vine deserves its due for its brief and influential run; the six-second video app helped define much of what a video-first social network could be. Still, the next major turn did not arrive until TikTok exploded. The app launched in the US in 2018, after earlier success in China as Douyin and in other markets through Musical.ly. TikTok merged the vertical-first language of Stories with the lasting archive of YouTube, then lowered the barrier to making video even further. It offered filters in the spirit of Instagram and Snapchat, but it also supplied creators with a constant stream of prompts through trends, built-in music and sound effects, and simple tools to stitch or duet with other videos.

Just as important, TikTok made the algorithm the center of the product. Its default For You page meant creators did not have to obsess over a carefully curated profile or worry as much about posting too often. They could make videos quickly, publish frequently, and trust TikTok’s recommendation system to find an audience. That is exactly what happened. Before long, TikTok ranked among the fastest-growing apps in the world, and its daily engagement became the metric every rival wanted to match. Instagram may have had more total users, but TikTok users were spending far more time inside TikTok.

Once TikTok became a cultural force, the rest of the industry rushed toward vertical video. Instagram Reels arrived in 2020 and soon became central to both Instagram and Facebook. YouTube followed with Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had already launched and abandoned its own Stories-like product, Fleets. Full-screen, vertically scrolling video had become a common language of the smartphone era. At the same time, platforms chasing more engagement absorbed another TikTok lesson: stop depending on a user’s friends to provide compelling posts, and instead show whatever the algorithm predicts will hold attention. The old social network faded. In its place came social media as entertainment — a never-ending feed with a comments section attached.

Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024 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’s 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 “almost constantly.” YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.

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’s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok’s idea of prioritizing content over connection — 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. They’ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm, and small things like Clear Mode.

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

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’s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.

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. “So long as clients give us different assets — a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad — AI is essentially powering everything else,” YouTube’s Brian Albert told me last year. “From the audiences you’re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that’s actually showing.” 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.

Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It’s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more 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’re not going to want to go back. Here’s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook — only Reels. After all this time, they’ve 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.

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’t 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 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.

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 into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year’s 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 — and there might just be one brewing.