There’s something that’s been bothering me for a while about watching videos on my phone. I often feel less like I’m being entertained when I open up TikTok and more like I’m being advertised to—not surprising as a major part of TikTok’s business is selling you stuff. Only, I’ve noticed it when I accidentally wind up in the vertical video part of the YouTube app, and when a friend sends me an Instagram Reel. Increasingly it feels like the vertical videos I am confronted with are functionally just commercials, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about that.
I’m an American, so I’m used to all my entertainment trying to sell me stuff. Soap operas existed to sell soap. Radio and early TV programs were named after their sponsors. Movies love to show a hero tucking into a golden pile of McDonald’s French fries or enjoying the brisk taste of a Pepsi. Mass media has reach, and naturally, marketers want to take advantage of that. But vertical videos feel different. Where the other mediums seem capable of entertaining me without trying to sell something, every vertical video feels like a commercial.
This is not to denigrate the creators on TikTok and Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts and whatever the old blue Facebook app is doing. Many of those vertical video creators are very talented and make excellent commercials. There’s a guy on TikTok converting a U-Haul into a home to drive to Alaska and I watch his daily videos with absolute joy, but I can also see that this is a scheme by the guy, who used to work in marketing, to build up a social media following fast for later projects. It’s a long series of commercials and he’s the product. I’m also loving the shared universe of people making tooth-destroying ribbon candy. Logan’s and Hercules and Jeff’s make soothing dopamine-dispensing content! They are just also doing it to sell candy.
It’s not just the creators on social media making vertical commercials. . Last month Peacock, the streaming service best known for Bravo shows and the Olympics, started rolling out vertical video for exactly that reason. “We’re trying to give people reasons to open up our app every single day,” NBCUniversal Chairman Matt Strauss told The Hollywood Reporter at launch.
Warner Bros. Discovery was thinking similarly with the launch of shorts on HBO Max last month. In an announcement drenched with quotes presumably written in the bowels of Silicon Valley, WBD Executive Vice President of Product Management Liesel Kipp at told THR that adding vertical videos would “build on intuitive, familiar behaviors subscribers use every day” and that it would “translate those behaviors into new ways to discover programming.”
So…commercials.
That’s what Netflix uses them for too, and so was Paramount pre-Ellison acquisition. When I spoke to execs there back in 2024, they acknowledged that the deluge of people clipping Young Sheldon on TikTok had helped increase viewership and they were looking for more ways to advertise their shows on vertical video platforms.
It makes sense that the format has gravitated to just selling us stuff. Vertical videos are often short—most of the platforms only increased the length of videos well after they became popular. TikTok was the first vertical video behemoth, and when it launched videos could only be 15 seconds long. The limit only hit 10 minutes in 2023. For much of TikTok’s existence, videos were the same length as a commercial break on TV. When you have that limited amount of time to get people hooked, you’re going to inevitably use the same techniques others have used before you. For vertical video, that’s been commercials.
But it doesn’t have to be that way!. Duanju are a financial boon in China. Also called “vertical dramas” or “microdramas,” these are cheap and quickly made narratives that look like they were shot for Lifetime or the mid-2000s porn industry. They’re basically just the vertical half of what Quibi attempted back in 2020, but actually successful and with much, much less star power. Peacock just started experimenting with them in the U.S. Unfortunately the duanju I’ve stumbled across are AI slop of women in love with werewolves and sexy CEOs. They’re not good, but I don’t want to immediately write them off because at least they’re trying to be horny little adventures instead of ads.
I’m not confident they can replace the vertical video’s primary genre. Our phones are terrific for consuming content, but Americans like to watch entertainment that “matters” on a TV or in theaters. It was the COVID pandemic that made both audiences and companies realize that. Quibi’s April 2020 launch was marred by the demand for a TV app. People put down their phones and embraced the TV, and even the laptop instead. Since the world reopened, phones have become the dominant viewing device again. Yet, crucially, the TV is still where people tune into streaming video on demand. People like bite-size narratives but they want to watch them in full on their TV.
YouTube and Instagram know people prefer the TV too for longer stuff too. They’ve both been investing in a better TV experience because that’s where their audiences want to watch stuff. YouTube has been tinkering with its TV app for a few years now, making changes to the user interface to make it feel more like TV watching than the YouTube app blown up on a 16:9 display. Instagram launched a TV app late last year and last month acknowledged “[w]atching on TV is different from watching on a phone.” Consequently it announced changes were coming to the TV app, including horizontal video, episodic series, and “[l]onger-form creator content that enables creators to tell deeper stories and build stronger connections with their audiences through longer-form video on TV.”
If people don’t want to watch vertical video on a TV, that will continue to limit what kind of genres the format can embrace. Duanju could take off in the U.S. It’s been growing since 2024 and younger generations are smartphone natives who might be okay watching whole sagas as tiny vertical videos. Right now though, the vertical video landscape is still ads-oriented. Vertical videos might entertain for a moment, but they’re ultimately made to get us to go somewhere else. Sometimes that’s a candy store, sometimes it’s a streamer. Always, always, the vertical videos feel just like commercials. They’ll need something more than AI werewolves and dudes in $2,000 U-Haul homes to change that.
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