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How TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube copied their way to victory. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.
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Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. How TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube copied their way to victory. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
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For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV displays 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. 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 in a first, and they kicked off to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands.
Selfies were a vertical art form, 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 of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones clinched, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright.
That includes entertainment. As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It rolled out Stories in late 2013 as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to.
CEO Evan Spiegel called it a“Totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most beloved feature on Snapchat. That’s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly into Instagram.
Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, stated of Spiegel and Snapchat that“They deserve all the credit”for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air.
Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places. Stories weren’t 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’s users were already using Stories, Facebook kicked off flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive — you’d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend’s 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. With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that assisted invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform rolled out in the US in 2018, but had been beloved 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’s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.
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 — you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that’s 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. When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels rolled out 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 rolled out 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 — entertainment with a comments section. Short-form, vertical video has effectively clinched the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out.
Meta stated in 2024 that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and stated 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 stated 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 acquired 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 kicked off 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 major 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, sought 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.
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. All that stated, 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 major 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. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.