The vertical video takeover is here
The vertical video takeover is here
竖屏视频的时代已经到来
How TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube copied their way to victory. TikTok、Instagram 和 YouTube 是如何通过“借鉴”走向胜利的。
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.
曾几何时，每个社交和媒体平台都有自己独特的定位。YouTube 是观看电视节目和电影片段的地方，也是许多新兴创作者社区的家园。Instagram 主要用于分享图片。Netflix 试图成为点播版的 HBO。Facebook 主打社交好友。Twitter 专注于新闻。Snapchat 则是一款即时通讯应用。
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.
不过，所有这些应用都有一个共同点：它们都是伴随着智能手机成长起来的。数十亿新用户首次接触互联网，他们开始创作适合手中那种又高又窄的新设备的内容。自拍成为了一种竖屏艺术形式，这不仅是因为照片能更好地填满屏幕，还因为以这种方式握持手机拍照更加顺手。
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.
多年来，有些人一直抵制竖屏视频——他们认为人类的眼睛习惯于横向扫描而非纵向，且竖屏视频在宽屏笔记本电脑上看起来很糟糕。但最终手机赢了，我们习惯于竖着拿手机，因此我们的手机使用体验也随之竖向化了。这其中自然也包括娱乐内容。
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.
正如历史上多次发生的那样，Snap 比任何人都先洞察到了这一点。它在 2013 年底推出了“Stories”功能，作为一种更轻松的方式来查看朋友们的动态。首席执行官 Evan Spiegel 将其称为“一种与朋友或所有人分享你一天的全新方式”。该功能迅速走红，到 2014 年年中，它已成为 Snapchat 上最受欢迎的功能。
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.
这种病毒式的传播是马克·扎克伯格非常关注的。到了 2016 年 8 月，这一功能几乎被原封不动地复制到了 Instagram 中。时任 Instagram 首席执行官的凯文·斯特罗姆（Kevin Systrom）在谈到 Spiegel 和 Snapchat 时表示，Stories 的功劳“完全属于他们”。言下之意是什么？这意味着这不再是某个单一社交网络的专属功能，而是一种行业趋势。Stories 属于所有人，随后它开始出现在 LinkedIn、Tinder、Medium 以及其他许多平台上。
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.
Stories 起初并不全是视频，但随着摄像头性能和上传速度的提升，视频成为了许多“阅后即焚”空间中的主流媒介。视频类 Stories 具有两种近乎神奇的特性：它们非常适合无休止的“无脑”滑动，并且极易植入广告。
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.
在 Instagram 开启 Stories 功能仅几个月后，当时该平台一半的用户已经在使用该功能，Facebook 便开始向其中大量投放广告。Stories 的半随机性实际上让广告看起来不那么突兀——你可能会看到一张狗的照片、一段徒步视频、一条牛仔裤广告、朋友的化妆教程、早午餐照片，接着又是一条腮红广告。视频广告感觉更高端，占据了整个屏幕，因此对社交平台而言利润也丰厚得多。
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.
虽然要向短命但辉煌的 Vine 致歉（这个 6 秒视频平台为“视频优先”的社交网络贡献了许多创意），但直到 TikTok 崛起，局势才真正发生了再次转变。该平台于 2018 年在美国推出，但在此之前，它作为“抖音”在中国以及作为“Musical.ly”在其他地区已经流行了几年。TikTok 将 Stories 的“竖屏优先”格式与 YouTube 的“永久性”结合在一起，并让视频创作变得前所未有的简单。
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.
它拥有像 Instagram 和 Snapchat 那样的滤镜，同时通过平台上的各种热门趋势提供源源不断的视频创意，提供音乐和音效库，并让“拼接（Stitch）”或“合拍（Duet）”视频变得轻而易举。
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.
通过默认采用纯算法驱动的“为你推荐（For You）”页面，TikTok 还将创作者从精心打理个人主页或担心发布过多的压力中解放出来——你只需不断产出视频，剩下的交给算法去分发即可。于是，人们纷纷效仿。很快，TikTok 成为了全球增长最快的应用之一，其日活跃用户数令整个行业艳羡。Instagram 的用户总数或许更多，但 TikTok 用户在应用上花费的时间要长得多。
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.
当 TikTok 成为一种现象级产品时，几乎所有人都加入了竖屏视频的行列。Reels 于 2020 年推出，并成为 Instagram 和 Facebook 的核心功能；YouTube 在一年后推出了 Shorts。到 2021 年底，Twitter 甚至推出并随后砍掉了一个类似的功能，名为 Fleets。至此，这种全屏、竖向滚动的视频已成为智能手机时代的“通用语言”。
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.
与此同时，为了追求更高的用户参与度，这些平台从 TikTok 那里学到了另一课：不再依赖你的朋友发布有趣的内容，而是直接向你展示算法认为你可能喜欢的一切。社交网络时代已经终结，取而代之的是社交媒体——即带有评论区的娱乐平台。
How it’s going
现状如何
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.
短视频和竖屏视频实际上已经赢得了互联网。业务蒸蒸日上，观众也没有表现出厌倦的迹象。Meta 在 2024 年表示，Instagram 用户超过一半的时间花在 Reels 上，并称到 2025 年，该功能已成为 Meta 旗下应用中每年 500 亿美元规模的业务。根据皮尤研究中心的数据，约 63% 的年轻人和青少年都在使用 TikTok。