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The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

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.

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, 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 won, 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 launched 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 popular 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, said 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 began 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 helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t 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’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 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 — entertainment with a comments section.

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.

  • The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)
  • If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.
  • It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.
  • New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators.
  • All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!
  • You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.
  • Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube"> The vertical video takeover is hereThis is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.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.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, 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 won, 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 launched 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 popular 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, said 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 began 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 helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t 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’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 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 — entertainment with a comments section.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 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.The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators. All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.David PierceCloseDavid PiercePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by David PierceColumnCloseColumnPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ColumnCreatorsCloseCreatorsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All CreatorsFacebookCloseFacebookPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All FacebookInstagramCloseInstagramPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All InstagramMetaCloseMetaPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All MetaSocial MediaCloseSocial MediaPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Social MediaStreamingCloseStreamingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All StreamingTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechThe StepbackCloseThe StepbackPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All The StepbackTikTokCloseTikTokPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TikTokYouTubeCloseYouTubePosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All YouTube#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube
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The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

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.

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, 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 won, 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 launched 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 popular 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, said 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 began 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 helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t 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’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 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 — entertainment with a comments section.

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.

  • The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)
  • If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.
  • It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.
  • New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators.
  • All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!
  • You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.
  • Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube">The vertical video takeover is here

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

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.

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, 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 won, 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 launched 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 popular 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, said 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 began 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 helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t 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’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 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 — entertainment with a comments section.

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.

  • The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)
  • If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.
  • It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.
  • New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators.
  • All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!
  • You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.
  • Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech…

iPhone box in front of the camera as around 250 viewers place their bids.

“This could be yours, chat,” the host says. “Wake it up.” The host’s face is hidden from view, with just their hands visible in front of stacks of iPhone, iPad, and MacBook boxes. The TikTok auction starts at $1. As the timer counts down, the price quickly shoots up, with a bid of over $100 scoring the win. After the bidding closes, a digital prize wheel appears and spins through multiple possible products before landing on what the high bidder just won: a teddy bear.

The winner was pissed. “I just paid $147 for a stuffed animal,” they wrote in the stream’s chatlog. “When I was bidding, you said that I could win that iPhone, and it gave me a BB3 Zodiac,” they said, referring to the Labubu-style plushie that retails for about $20. “That’s a scam. Please return my money.”

This person was not alone in their frustration. Multiple viewers of the stream were outraged when they placed high bids hoping to score Apple devices, only to learn their reward was the chance to spin a digital prize wheel that landed on something cheap. “Man, hell no. This is false advertising. Why would I pay $55 for a damn charger?” wrote another angry bidder. “Calling my bank now.” The demand for refunds was a common refrain.

This is all part of TikTok’s feature, called a “Surprise Set,” where auction hosts create buckets of up to 500 products and whoever bids the most walks away with a random pick from the available prizes. These streams often include a few big ticket items, like iPhones and iPads, to lure viewers in. The rest of the items are less desirable, like charging cords and pencil cases. This feature was added late last year to the platform and remains an invitation-only feature for sellers on TikTok.

Many of the streaming set-ups for these TikTok “Surprise Sets” look very similar: a pile of expensive products is shown on screen, with different hosts rallying a couple hundred concurrent viewers to bid higher and higher amounts. If a viewer taps on a small button in the lower left corner of the screen, they can see the live probability of winning each item as well as the full list of what items are still available.

The popularity of “Surprise Sets” on TikTok are emblematic of how gambling-like interactions currently dominate the experience of going online, where prediction markets and sports betting reign. People can even wager on the outcome of reality TV shows.

WIRED reached out to TikTok for comment on Wednesday of last week to share examples of frustrated viewers who felt scammed. One day later on Thursday, TikTok rolled out a change to its livestream policies and what hosts are allowed to do for “Surprise Sets.” (It’s a policy update that TikTok claims was already in the works.) Hosts are no longer allowed to include iPhones, iPads, televisions, diamonds, gift cards, or precious metals as part of the prizes available for viewers to win during surprise auctions. Following this rule change, hosts seem to be following the new guidelines, with no iPhones appearing in livestream “Surprise Sets” seen by WIRED.

“TikTok Shop requires all sellers, including those running Surprise Sets, to accurately present what is being offered. We will take enforcement action on violations of our policies, including removing products and suspending accounts,” TikTok spokesperson Ben Rathe said in a statement to WIRED. If a buyer feels like they were misled, they can reach out to TikTok’s customer support to review the purchase.

#TikTok #Shoppers #Thought #Bidding #iPhones #Won #Teddy #Bearstiktok,gambling,livestreaming,social media"> TikTok Shoppers Thought They Were Bidding on iPhones. Instead, They Won Teddy BearsA TikTok livestream host waves an iPhone box in front of the camera as around 250 viewers place their bids.“This could be yours, chat,” the host says. “Wake it up.” The host’s face is hidden from view, with just their hands visible in front of stacks of iPhone, iPad, and MacBook boxes. The TikTok auction starts at . As the timer counts down, the price quickly shoots up, with a bid of over 0 scoring the win. After the bidding closes, a digital prize wheel appears and spins through multiple possible products before landing on what the high bidder just won: a teddy bear.The winner was pissed. “I just paid 7 for a stuffed animal,” they wrote in the stream’s chatlog. “When I was bidding, you said that I could win that iPhone, and it gave me a BB3 Zodiac,” they said, referring to the Labubu-style plushie that retails for about . “That’s a scam. Please return my money.”This person was not alone in their frustration. Multiple viewers of the stream were outraged when they placed high bids hoping to score Apple devices, only to learn their reward was the chance to spin a digital prize wheel that landed on something cheap. “Man, hell no. This is false advertising. Why would I pay for a damn charger?” wrote another angry bidder. “Calling my bank now.” The demand for refunds was a common refrain.This is all part of TikTok’s feature, called a “Surprise Set,” where auction hosts create buckets of up to 500 products and whoever bids the most walks away with a random pick from the available prizes. These streams often include a few big ticket items, like iPhones and iPads, to lure viewers in. The rest of the items are less desirable, like charging cords and pencil cases. This feature was added late last year to the platform and remains an invitation-only feature for sellers on TikTok.Many of the streaming set-ups for these TikTok “Surprise Sets” look very similar: a pile of expensive products is shown on screen, with different hosts rallying a couple hundred concurrent viewers to bid higher and higher amounts. If a viewer taps on a small button in the lower left corner of the screen, they can see the live probability of winning each item as well as the full list of what items are still available.The popularity of “Surprise Sets” on TikTok are emblematic of how gambling-like interactions currently dominate the experience of going online, where prediction markets and sports betting reign. People can even wager on the outcome of reality TV shows.WIRED reached out to TikTok for comment on Wednesday of last week to share examples of frustrated viewers who felt scammed. One day later on Thursday, TikTok rolled out a change to its livestream policies and what hosts are allowed to do for “Surprise Sets.” (It’s a policy update that TikTok claims was already in the works.) Hosts are no longer allowed to include iPhones, iPads, televisions, diamonds, gift cards, or precious metals as part of the prizes available for viewers to win during surprise auctions. Following this rule change, hosts seem to be following the new guidelines, with no iPhones appearing in livestream “Surprise Sets” seen by WIRED.“TikTok Shop requires all sellers, including those running Surprise Sets, to accurately present what is being offered. We will take enforcement action on violations of our policies, including removing products and suspending accounts,” TikTok spokesperson Ben Rathe said in a statement to WIRED. If a buyer feels like they were misled, they can reach out to TikTok’s customer support to review the purchase.#TikTok #Shoppers #Thought #Bidding #iPhones #Won #Teddy #Bearstiktok,gambling,livestreaming,social media
Tech-news

iPhone box in front of the camera as around 250 viewers place their bids.

“This could be yours, chat,” the host says. “Wake it up.” The host’s face is hidden from view, with just their hands visible in front of stacks of iPhone, iPad, and MacBook boxes. The TikTok auction starts at $1. As the timer counts down, the price quickly shoots up, with a bid of over $100 scoring the win. After the bidding closes, a digital prize wheel appears and spins through multiple possible products before landing on what the high bidder just won: a teddy bear.

The winner was pissed. “I just paid $147 for a stuffed animal,” they wrote in the stream’s chatlog. “When I was bidding, you said that I could win that iPhone, and it gave me a BB3 Zodiac,” they said, referring to the Labubu-style plushie that retails for about $20. “That’s a scam. Please return my money.”

This person was not alone in their frustration. Multiple viewers of the stream were outraged when they placed high bids hoping to score Apple devices, only to learn their reward was the chance to spin a digital prize wheel that landed on something cheap. “Man, hell no. This is false advertising. Why would I pay $55 for a damn charger?” wrote another angry bidder. “Calling my bank now.” The demand for refunds was a common refrain.

This is all part of TikTok’s feature, called a “Surprise Set,” where auction hosts create buckets of up to 500 products and whoever bids the most walks away with a random pick from the available prizes. These streams often include a few big ticket items, like iPhones and iPads, to lure viewers in. The rest of the items are less desirable, like charging cords and pencil cases. This feature was added late last year to the platform and remains an invitation-only feature for sellers on TikTok.

Many of the streaming set-ups for these TikTok “Surprise Sets” look very similar: a pile of expensive products is shown on screen, with different hosts rallying a couple hundred concurrent viewers to bid higher and higher amounts. If a viewer taps on a small button in the lower left corner of the screen, they can see the live probability of winning each item as well as the full list of what items are still available.

The popularity of “Surprise Sets” on TikTok are emblematic of how gambling-like interactions currently dominate the experience of going online, where prediction markets and sports betting reign. People can even wager on the outcome of reality TV shows.

WIRED reached out to TikTok for comment on Wednesday of last week to share examples of frustrated viewers who felt scammed. One day later on Thursday, TikTok rolled out a change to its livestream policies and what hosts are allowed to do for “Surprise Sets.” (It’s a policy update that TikTok claims was already in the works.) Hosts are no longer allowed to include iPhones, iPads, televisions, diamonds, gift cards, or precious metals as part of the prizes available for viewers to win during surprise auctions. Following this rule change, hosts seem to be following the new guidelines, with no iPhones appearing in livestream “Surprise Sets” seen by WIRED.

“TikTok Shop requires all sellers, including those running Surprise Sets, to accurately present what is being offered. We will take enforcement action on violations of our policies, including removing products and suspending accounts,” TikTok spokesperson Ben Rathe said in a statement to WIRED. If a buyer feels like they were misled, they can reach out to TikTok’s customer support to review the purchase.

#TikTok #Shoppers #Thought #Bidding #iPhones #Won #Teddy #Bearstiktok,gambling,livestreaming,social media">TikTok Shoppers Thought They Were Bidding on iPhones. Instead, They Won Teddy Bears

A TikTok livestream host waves an iPhone box in front of the camera as around 250 viewers place their bids.

“This could be yours, chat,” the host says. “Wake it up.” The host’s face is hidden from view, with just their hands visible in front of stacks of iPhone, iPad, and MacBook boxes. The TikTok auction starts at $1. As the timer counts down, the price quickly shoots up, with a bid of over $100 scoring the win. After the bidding closes, a digital prize wheel appears and spins through multiple possible products before landing on what the high bidder just won: a teddy bear.

The winner was pissed. “I just paid $147 for a stuffed animal,” they wrote in the stream’s chatlog. “When I was bidding, you said that I could win that iPhone, and it gave me a BB3 Zodiac,” they said, referring to the Labubu-style plushie that retails for about $20. “That’s a scam. Please return my money.”

This person was not alone in their frustration. Multiple viewers of the stream were outraged when they placed high bids hoping to score Apple devices, only to learn their reward was the chance to spin a digital prize wheel that landed on something cheap. “Man, hell no. This is false advertising. Why would I pay $55 for a damn charger?” wrote another angry bidder. “Calling my bank now.” The demand for refunds was a common refrain.

This is all part of TikTok’s feature, called a “Surprise Set,” where auction hosts create buckets of up to 500 products and whoever bids the most walks away with a random pick from the available prizes. These streams often include a few big ticket items, like iPhones and iPads, to lure viewers in. The rest of the items are less desirable, like charging cords and pencil cases. This feature was added late last year to the platform and remains an invitation-only feature for sellers on TikTok.

Many of the streaming set-ups for these TikTok “Surprise Sets” look very similar: a pile of expensive products is shown on screen, with different hosts rallying a couple hundred concurrent viewers to bid higher and higher amounts. If a viewer taps on a small button in the lower left corner of the screen, they can see the live probability of winning each item as well as the full list of what items are still available.

The popularity of “Surprise Sets” on TikTok are emblematic of how gambling-like interactions currently dominate the experience of going online, where prediction markets and sports betting reign. People can even wager on the outcome of reality TV shows.

WIRED reached out to TikTok for comment on Wednesday of last week to share examples of frustrated viewers who felt scammed. One day later on Thursday, TikTok rolled out a change to its livestream policies and what hosts are allowed to do for “Surprise Sets.” (It’s a policy update that TikTok claims was already in the works.) Hosts are no longer allowed to include iPhones, iPads, televisions, diamonds, gift cards, or precious metals as part of the prizes available for viewers to win during surprise auctions. Following this rule change, hosts seem to be following the new guidelines, with no iPhones appearing in livestream “Surprise Sets” seen by WIRED.

“TikTok Shop requires all sellers, including those running Surprise Sets, to accurately present what is being offered. We will take enforcement action on violations of our policies, including removing products and suspending accounts,” TikTok spokesperson Ben Rathe said in a statement to WIRED. If a buyer feels like they were misled, they can reach out to TikTok’s customer support to review the purchase.

#TikTok #Shoppers #Thought #Bidding #iPhones #Won #Teddy #Bearstiktok,gambling,livestreaming,social media

A TikTok livestream host waves an iPhone box in front of the camera as around…

Bloomberg. The suit, filed by the Breathitt County School District in Kentucky, claims that social media has disrupted learning and created a mental health crisis, straining budgets. The terms of the settlement have not been revealed yet, and Meta is still facing a trial in the same suit, which is viewed as a bellwether for over 1,000 similar lawsuits across the country

This follows an earlier case, settled by Snap and TikTok, in which a 19-year-old plaintiff claimed significant personal injury due to addictive social media apps. Google and Meta did not agree to a settlement in that suit, and it eventually went to trial, where a jury awarded the plaintiff $6 million. Meta also recently lost a suit brought by New Mexico’s Attorney General, to the tune of $375 million.

Beyond monetary awards, many, including New Mexico, are pushing for significant changes to social media apps to limit their harm to minors. And this is just the start of what’s shaping up to be a busy year for social media lawsuits. According to Bloomberg, lawyers representing school districts said their “focus remains on pursuing justice for the remaining 1,200 school districts who have filed cases.”

#Snap #YouTube #TikTok #settle #suit #harm #studentsCreators,Facebook,Law,Meta,News,Policy,Snapchat,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,TikTok,YouTube"> Snap, YouTube, and TikTok settle suit over harm to studentsSnap, YouTube, and TikTok have settled the first lawsuit of its kind, alleging that social media addiction has cost public schools massive amounts of money, according to Bloomberg. The suit, filed by the Breathitt County School District in Kentucky, claims that social media has disrupted learning and created a mental health crisis, straining budgets. The terms of the settlement have not been revealed yet, and Meta is still facing a trial in the same suit, which is viewed as a bellwether for over 1,000 similar lawsuits across the countryThis follows an earlier case, settled by Snap and TikTok, in which a 19-year-old plaintiff claimed significant personal injury due to addictive social media apps. Google and Meta did not agree to a settlement in that suit, and it eventually went to trial, where a jury awarded the plaintiff million. Meta also recently lost a suit brought by New Mexico’s Attorney General, to the tune of 5 million.Beyond monetary awards, many, including New Mexico, are pushing for significant changes to social media apps to limit their harm to minors. And this is just the start of what’s shaping up to be a busy year for social media lawsuits. According to Bloomberg, lawyers representing school districts said their “focus remains on pursuing justice for the remaining 1,200 school districts who have filed cases.”#Snap #YouTube #TikTok #settle #suit #harm #studentsCreators,Facebook,Law,Meta,News,Policy,Snapchat,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,TikTok,YouTube
Tech-news

Bloomberg. The suit, filed by the Breathitt County School District in Kentucky, claims that social media has disrupted learning and created a mental health crisis, straining budgets. The terms of the settlement have not been revealed yet, and Meta is still facing a trial in the same suit, which is viewed as a bellwether for over 1,000 similar lawsuits across the country

This follows an earlier case, settled by Snap and TikTok, in which a 19-year-old plaintiff claimed significant personal injury due to addictive social media apps. Google and Meta did not agree to a settlement in that suit, and it eventually went to trial, where a jury awarded the plaintiff $6 million. Meta also recently lost a suit brought by New Mexico’s Attorney General, to the tune of $375 million.

Beyond monetary awards, many, including New Mexico, are pushing for significant changes to social media apps to limit their harm to minors. And this is just the start of what’s shaping up to be a busy year for social media lawsuits. According to Bloomberg, lawyers representing school districts said their “focus remains on pursuing justice for the remaining 1,200 school districts who have filed cases.”

#Snap #YouTube #TikTok #settle #suit #harm #studentsCreators,Facebook,Law,Meta,News,Policy,Snapchat,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,TikTok,YouTube">Snap, YouTube, and TikTok settle suit over harm to students

Snap, YouTube, and TikTok have settled the first lawsuit of its kind, alleging that social media addiction has cost public schools massive amounts of money, according to Bloomberg. The suit, filed by the Breathitt County School District in Kentucky, claims that social media has disrupted learning and created a mental health crisis, straining budgets. The terms of the settlement have not been revealed yet, and Meta is still facing a trial in the same suit, which is viewed as a bellwether for over 1,000 similar lawsuits across the country

This follows an earlier case, settled by Snap and TikTok, in which a 19-year-old plaintiff claimed significant personal injury due to addictive social media apps. Google and Meta did not agree to a settlement in that suit, and it eventually went to trial, where a jury awarded the plaintiff $6 million. Meta also recently lost a suit brought by New Mexico’s Attorney General, to the tune of $375 million.

Beyond monetary awards, many, including New Mexico, are pushing for significant changes to social media apps to limit their harm to minors. And this is just the start of what’s shaping up to be a busy year for social media lawsuits. According to Bloomberg, lawyers representing school districts said their “focus remains on pursuing justice for the remaining 1,200 school districts who have filed cases.”

#Snap #YouTube #TikTok #settle #suit #harm #studentsCreators,Facebook,Law,Meta,News,Policy,Snapchat,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,TikTok,YouTube

Snap, YouTube, and TikTok have settled the first lawsuit of its kind, alleging that social…