A Short History of Vertical Video, From Vine to Shorts

Vertical video was not invented. It was allowed. For a century the moving image was wider than it was tall because screens were, and the phone, held the way a hand holds it, quietly reversed the assumption. The history of short-form video is the history of platforms accepting that reversal, one at a time, and then competing over how many seconds to permit.

The phone’s frame (2011 to 2013)

The first mass product built for the upright frame was a messaging app. Snapchat launched on iOS as “Picaboo” on July 8, 2011, and was relaunched under its current name in September 2011. In October 2013 it added “My Story”, which let users “compile snaps into chronological storylines, accessible to all of their friends”, and in January 2015 it opened Discover, “an area containing channels of ad-supported short-form content from major publishers”. Every later feed borrows from those two ideas: the disappearing daily reel and the publisher channel inside an app.

The loop arrived next. Vine) was founded in June 2012 by Rus Yusupov, Dom Hofmann and Colin Kroll, and was “bought by Twitter, Inc., four months later for $30 million”. The app launched on iOS on January 24, 2013, with clips “up to 6-second-long” that looped. By December 2015 it had “over 200 million active users”. Twitter announced the end of uploads on October 27, 2016, and “officially shut down Vine” on January 17, 2017. An archive of every Vine went up three days later and was discontinued in April 2018. Hofmann’s successor app, Byte, launched on January 24, 2020, was renamed Clash and then Huddles, and closed on May 3, 2023.

Fifteen seconds (2014 to 2018)

Musical.ly was founded in Shanghai by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. A prototype appeared in April 2014 and “the official version was launched in August 2014”. Built for short lip-sync videos, it had 90 million registered users by mid-2016 and “over 200 million users” by the end of May 2017.

In China, ByteDance launched Douyin on September 20, 2016, first under the name A.me, and took it international as TikTok in September 2017. The app’s original recording unit was a 15-second video. ByteDance bought Musical.ly in November 2017 for a reported $800 million to $1 billion, and on August 2, 2018, the two apps merged “with existing accounts and data consolidated into one app, keeping the title TikTok”. By September 2021 TikTok had one billion monthly active users.

Instagram, meanwhile, had copied Snapchat’s daily reel as Instagram Stories in August 2016 and, in June 2018, launched IGTV, “a vertical video application”, which is remembered mostly for proving that a separate app was the wrong container.

The copies (2019 to 2021)

The incumbents answered TikTok inside their main apps. Instagram announced a test of Reels in Brazil in November 2019 and launched it in 50 countries, including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, in August 2020, with clips of 15 to 30 seconds.

YouTube Shorts began as a beta in India on September 15, 2020, arrived in the United States in March 2021, and went worldwide on July 13, 2021. YouTube backed it in August 2021 with a Shorts Fund of $100 million to be paid out across 2021 and 2022, and in February 2023 folded Shorts into the YouTube Partner Program so that creators shared advertising revenue.

Length creep (2022 to 2025)

Once every platform had a vertical feed, the competition moved to the ceiling. Reels went to 60 and then 90 seconds in June 2022, and Instagram announced a three-minute limit in January 2025. Shorts, capped at 60 seconds from launch, went to three minutes in October 2024. TikTok’s hosted videos, by the platform’s own description, now range “from three seconds to 60 minutes”.

The audience has been less interested in the ceilings than the platforms are. The channel this magazine profiled this week, PopcornTheory, has posted 335 Shorts with a median length of 32 seconds, and the volume figures YouTube reports for the format suggest the short unit is where the viewing is: more than 30 billion daily views in September 2022, and more than 100 billion a day by November 2025.

The timeline

What the upright frame changed

Three things, none of them about length. First, the frame matched the hand, so watching stopped being an act of turning the phone and became the default state of holding it. Second, the loop, Vine’s contribution, made the ending a beginning, and every feed since has been built to keep the thumb moving. Third, the feed replaced the channel: Snapchat’s Discover and Instagram’s Reels tab taught audiences to watch a stream of strangers rather than a list of subscriptions.

The dates above are the platforms’ story. The audience’s story is shorter. Somewhere between six seconds and three minutes, people found the length of a thing worth telling, and they have been telling it ever since.