The Journey of Short Video Platform Giants: TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram

Short videos have become the rising star of various content types in the market. Product reviews, slices of life, news, and even comedy are started to be packaged into short videos. With the short duration, content is easier to grab the attention of the audience and could lead to higher view rates. Therefore, many social media platforms try to dominate the short video market, such as these 3 giant players in the market; TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. It is predicted that billions of dollars will flow into these platforms over the next few years due to the positive performance of short video marketing to various big brands. So, let's learn more about these 3 giants’ journey.

The Top 3 Giants in The Industry

TikTok is the youngest yet one of the most popular social media nowadays. It is the game changer in the industry, with its main product, short videos completed with eclectic music, sound, and filters. Well, no wonder since TikTok makes it easier for audiences to watch videos anytime and anywhere by implementing full-screen vertical mode video. Its competitor, YouTube, was previously only known as a video application that supports high definition (HD) formats with a longer duration but uses the horizontal mode for full-screen mode. While Instagram, as the giant in the photo and video content market, tries to follow this step. We can see that all three want to show dominance in vertically presenting video content. But the question is, who will win? Before that, let’s take a step back to see their history.

The Start of Short Video Popularity

The short video era started with Vine, a popular short video platform that attracts young creators and audiences. Unfortunately, Vine was shut down in 2017 because it failed to support content creators due to high levels of competition, lack of monetization, and advertising options, as well as issues at its parent company, Twitter. The Vine shutdown created a massive worldwide gap in the short video market. This gap is utilized by TikTok and made it famous and gained a lot of users in countries such as the United States and India. According to Sensor Tower Data, the app has been downloaded more than 1 billion times on Apple iOS and Android since February 2019. The growth multiplied in 2020 since Covid-19 hit globally and made countries implement lockdown policies that made people spend most of their time at home and use social media like TikTok to kill boredom. 

TikTok Dominance Across Platforms

TikTok started with an “all out” promotion and marketing, such as endorsing popular YouTube and Instagram content creators to promote TikTok, to being the official sponsor for UEFA EURO 2020 and UEFA Women’s 2022. One of its strongest points is its “addiction” strategy. TikTok lets audiences worldwide watch various types of short video content from different creators worldwide continuously on their For You Page (FYP). Not only “dancing” videos, but TikTok also grew various types of content, including education, life hacks, travel destinations, product reviews, and even random videos. This made audiences not want to stop watching videos on TikTok. TikTok also allows users to use different music from countries and unique filters, which engage more users to create content. 

Competition in The Short Video Industry

However, this popularity grew along with an issue, user data protection. The current U.S. President of the time, Donald Trump, is concerned about Bytedance as TikTok's parent company, with its possibility of sharing U.S. user data with the Chinese government. Though TikTok replied and claimed that user data was not shared and only stored on servers in the U.S. and Singapore, this issue greatly destabilized the app’s existence in the U.S. In addition, India decided to ban TikTok in June 2020 and make a gap to fill in the market for competitors like YouTube and Meta to try bringing their short video products to market. 

Since YouTube and Meta already had a large built-in audience, Instagram and YouTube quickly took off some portion of the market. Meta didn't disclose how many monthly users are interacting with reels, but Mark Zuckerberg as the CEO, said that reels already make up more than 20% of people's time on Instagram. YouTube parent company, Google announced in June that more than 1.5 billion people watch short films on YouTube each month. This number is starting to compete with TikTok, which in September was estimated to have up to 1.6 billion monthly users. The craze and popularity for short videos also prompted similar platforms like Pinterest to create Watch, Netflix to create Fast Laughs, and Twitter to test and develop the Explore tab that allows users to scroll through short video tweets. 

Current Main Player of Short Video Content

Though Reels and Shorts quickly took off, TikTok certainly seems still to be the leader in popularity among users. A survey by Inmar Intelligence shows that 44% of respondents chose TikTok as their favorite short-form video service, followed by YouTube Shorts at 29%, and Instagram Reels at 20%. Sensor Tower Data also shows in 2022, TikTok leads the global user average time spent with 95 minutes per day, while YouTube with 74 minutes, and Instagram with only 51 minutes. With an increase of up to $8 billion from last year, TikTok is expected to reach around $12 billion of advertising revenue this year and lead the market (EMarketer, 2022). Without losing any hope, Instagram and YouTube have also started advertising. We know that their parent companies, Google and Meta, are two of the world's largest online advertising companies. Therefore, there's no doubt that they will put extra effort into making digital advertising one of their primary products and be a big part of their growth story. 

TikTok seems to have unlimited bright ideas. It showed from the TikTok Shop launch that helps audiences buy directly after watching review videos on TikTok. This help increases the use and addiction to TikTok. YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels yet follow this bright feature. But, they have their unique strategies, which TikTok has not mastered. YouTube Shorts allows creators to use the analytics tools on YouTube's primary platform, which provides data about the video audiences. Meta, with its two giant social media, Facebook and Instagram, also want to shift toward short-form video content creators that can compete with TikTok by reallocating resources from its Facebook News tab and newsletter platform Bulletin. However, TikTok's products and algorithm still made it attract more users among the short video platforms. This surely helps TikTok remain the front runner in this race, at least for now.

Well, what do you think about this short video market growth? Isn't it wonderful to see the rapid change from the previous long video and square photos to being dominated by short videos? 

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