Media
Vertical video has won the internet. Now the hard part begins.
Snapchat's Stories launched in 2013. By 2025, short-form vertical video had become the most successful marketing format and a $50 billion annual business for Meta alone. Here's how it happened, and what comes next.
Emmanuel Fabrice Omgbwa Yasse AI-assisted
2026-08-03 · 2 min read
It took a decade, but vertical video has effectively consumed the internet. The transformation wasn't a single event; it was a slow, relentless replication of a winning idea across every major platform.
The rise of vertical video
Snapchat launched Stories in late 2013, giving users a way to share ephemeral moments in a vertical format. By the middle of 2014, it was the app's most popular feature. Mark Zuckerberg noticed, and Instagram copied Stories almost exactly in August 2016. Instagram's then-CEO Kevin Systrom acknowledged Snapchat deserved all the credit, but the feature was no longer proprietary; it belonged to every platform. Stories spread to LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and beyond.
Then came TikTok in 2018. It combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video creation easier: filters, music, trends, and the ability to stitch or duet. By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok freed creators from worrying about their profile's curation. They could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. The formula worked. TikTok became one of the fastest-growing apps ever, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry.
The economics of endless scrolling
The financial incentives behind vertical video are staggering. Meta said in 2024 that Instagram users spent more than half their time in Reels, and by 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 Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.
The advertising model is self-reinforcing. Vertical video ads feel less intrusive when interspersed with friends' posts, and platforms can use AI to target them. YouTube's Brian Albert explained last year: '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.' Platforms have also begun requiring AI labels on such ads, a sign of how deeply the technology is embedded mandatory AI labels on ads. The easier it becomes for advertisers to buy vertical video inventory, the more platforms invest in the format.
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