Every figure on this page links to the organization that produced it, and each was re-checked against that source before publishing. How many views YouTube Shorts and Reels get, how many people use each platform and what each count actually counts, TikTok's U.S. status, who watches and who makes short videos, how long a Short, Reel or TikTok can be, how creators are paid, what short-form video earns platforms and advertisers, and which popular short-form statistics do not survive being traced to their origin.
YouTube says Shorts average over 200 billion daily views, a figure first announced in June 2025, after it began counting a view each time a Short starts to play. (YouTube)See details
Meta's latest daily Reels figure, more than 200 billion plays across Facebook and Instagram, dates from July 2023. (Meta)See details
TikTok has given no higher worldwide user figure since September 2021, when it said more than 1 billion people used it every month. Larger totals come from advertising-reach tools and resellers. (TikTok)See details
37% of U.S. adults used TikTok in 2025, according to Pew, while 42% of Americans aged 12 and over did in January 2026, according to Edison Research: different ages, different questions. (Pew Research Center; Edison Research)See details
The most active 25% of U.S. adult TikTok users produced 98% of the public videos from U.S. adults in Pew's 2023 study. (Pew Research Center)See details
Reels made up 50% of time spent on Instagram in April 2024, up from more than 20% two years earlier. (Meta)See details
YouTube Shorts can run up to 3 minutes, TikTok accepts uploads of up to 60 minutes, and Meta says reels on Facebook have no length restrictions. (YouTube; TikTok; Meta)See details
YouTube Shorts creators keep 45% of their allocation from a pooled Creator Pool; TikTok's Creator Rewards Program needs 10,000 followers and pays only for videos at least one minute long. (YouTube; TikTok)See details
Meta put Reels' annual revenue run rate at over $50 billion in October 2025, up from more than $10 billion in July 2023. No filing reports Reels revenue. (Meta)See details
HubSpot's 'highest ROI' claim began as 30% of social media marketers planning to invest more in short-form video than in any other strategy. Asked about ROI in 2025, 21% named it. (HubSpot)See details
The popular '73% prefer short video' figure is one edition of a Wyzowl survey whose answer has ranged from 44% to 78%. (Wyzowl)See details
How many views do YouTube Shorts and Reels get?
YouTube says Shorts average over 200 billion daily views, a milestone its CEO Neal Mohan announced at Cannes Lions on June 18, 2025. Meta's latest comparable figure for Reels is two years older: Reels plays exceed 200 billion per day across Facebook and Instagram, Meta said on its July 26, 2023 earnings call. We found no newer daily plays figure in any Meta earnings call through July 2026.
YouTube's number has been announced in steps, mostly by Alphabet's CEO on quarterly earnings calls. Each step is a floor ("over"), stated on the date shown.
YouTube Shorts average daily views, as YouTube stated themBillions of views per day. The June 2025 figure (lighter bar) was announced after YouTube began counting a view the moment a Short starts to play (March 31, 2025); YouTube has not said which count it uses, so it is not directly comparable with the earlier five.
Earlier counting method
Announced after the March 31, 2025 view-count change
The last two numbers were not counted the same way. YouTube's help page says that starting 3/31/2025 a Shorts view is counted each time a Short starts to play or replays, with no minimum watch time, and the older measure was renamed "engaged views" (YouTube Help). The 200 billion figure was announced after that change, and YouTube has not said which count it uses. Treat the rise from 70 billion to 200 billion as partly a change of definition, not a growth rate.
Meta's Reels series is shorter. It reported more than 140 billion Reels plays a day across Facebook and Instagram on its October 26, 2022 earnings call, 50% more than six months earlier, before the 200 billion figure above. In January 2025 Meta said Reels were reshared over 4.5 billion times a day (Q4 2024 earnings call).
TikTok publishes no daily view count. The closest official number comes from the U.S. Supreme Court, whose January 2025 opinion records that U.S. TikTok users uploaded more than 5.5 billion videos in 2023, viewed more than 13 trillion times around the world (TikTok Inc. v. Garland). TikTok's own enforcement data give a sense of worldwide upload volume. It removed 91,003,510 videos for breaking its rules in January to March 2023, which its data file gives as 0.6% of all published videos (TikTok Community Guidelines Enforcement data, Q1 2023). Because TikTok rounds that rate, the two numbers imply roughly 14.0 to 16.5 billion videos published worldwide in that one quarter, by our calculation.
How many people use Shorts, Reels, TikTok and Spotlight?
The platforms count different things, so their totals cannot be ranked against each other. YouTube's latest Shorts audience figure is over 2 billion logged-in users a month, first given in July 2023 and repeated in October 2023. TikTok's worldwide figure is more than 1 billion people a month, unchanged since September 2021. Snap reports more than 550 million monthly Spotlight users for the second quarter of 2025. Meta publishes no user count for Reels.
By our calculation, TikTok's EU count grew about 51% between its first DSA disclosure and the first half of 2026, and Spotlight's monthly users rose about 37.5% in the two years to mid-2025. Both inputs to the Spotlight figure are floors, so the true change may differ. TikTok says its DSA counts are produced to comply with the law and "should not be relied on for other purposes", and that user figures it has shared elsewhere may use a different method and scope.
Three of the TikTok figures above are about different groups of people, even though they are often quoted as the same thing. The 200 million European figure covers 32 countries, including the UK and Switzerland, while the 189 million figure covers the EU alone. The 2026 figure for the U.S. has no time window, so it is not a monthly count.
What happened to TikTok in the United States?
TikTok still operates in the U.S., through TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, which was established in January 2026 and in which ByteDance kept 19.9%, according to the joint venture's announcement. Silver Lake, Oracle and MGX are its managing investors. The route there:
April 24, 2024: the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act became law, a day after Congress passed it; its prohibitions applied 270 days after enactment, with one presidential extension of up to 90 days (Public Law 118-50).
January 17, 2025: the Supreme Court upheld the law in TikTok Inc. v. Garland, holding that the challenged provisions do not violate the petitioners' First Amendment rights.
January 20, 2025: Executive Order 14166 told the Attorney General not to enforce the law for 75 days (Federal Register).
September 25, 2025: Executive Order 14352 found that a U.S. joint venture in which ByteDance owned less than 20% would count as a qualified divestiture, and paused enforcement for 120 days so it could close (Federal Register).
What share of people watch short-form video?
37% of U.S. adults said they use TikTok in 2025, up from 21% in 2021, and 84% said they ever use YouTube, according to Pew Research Center's survey of 5,022 adults fielded from February to June 2025. Among U.S. teens aged 13 to 17, 68% use TikTok (Pew) and 61% go on it daily (Pew), both from a survey of 1,458 teens in autumn 2025. Edison Research's Infinite Dial puts current TikTok use at 42% of Americans aged 12 and older in January 2026 (The Infinite Dial 2026).
Outside the U.S., regulators measure it directly. TikTok reached 56% of UK online adults in May 2025, and its users aged 18 to 34 spent 49 minutes a day on it, according to Ofcom's Online Nation report, which uses passive measurement of devices rather than recall. In Australia, 52% of adults watched user-generated or short-form online video in the week before the 2025 survey, down from 59% in 2024, and adults who used any video service that week averaged 4.2 hours of it, down from 4.9, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Children watch it too. U.S. children aged 8 and under spent an average of 14 minutes a day watching short videos on apps such as TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts in 2024, up from one minute in early 2020, according to Common Sense Media's census of 1,578 parents. In the UK, children aged 4 to 15 spent 8 hours 45 minutes a week watching video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and TikTok at home in 2025, about 16 minutes more than in 2024 (Ofcom).
Short-form video is also reaching the living room. Connected TVs accounted for 15% of Shorts viewing in the U.S., Google said in February 2025 (Alphabet Q4 2024 earnings call). YouTube as a whole, long-form included, took a record 15.8% of all U.S. TV viewing in August 2026, according to Nielsen's The Gauge.
Surveys asking what sounds like the same question get different answers, because they ask different people different things:
Reels alone made up 50% of the time people spent on Instagram, Meta said in April 2024, up from more than 20% two years earlier (Q1 2024 earnings call; Q1 2022 earnings call). Video of all kinds was more than 60% of time on both Facebook and Instagram at the same point (Meta).
Meta has since reported growth rather than shares. Video time spent on Instagram was up more than 30% on a year earlier in the third quarter of 2025 (Q3 2025 call). Instagram Reels watch time in the U.S. was up more than 30% year over year in the fourth quarter (Q4 2025 call). On Facebook, video time spent grew 9% globally in the second quarter of 2026, and over 10% in the U.S. and Canada (Q2 2026 call).
At Snap, time spent on Spotlight grew 23% in the second quarter of 2025 and made up more than 40% of all time spent watching content on Snapchat (Snap investor letter). Growth has slowed: total Spotlight watch time rose 11% year over year in the first quarter of 2026 (Snap investor letter).
"Short" is getting longer. TikTok said in March 2024 that its community spends 50% of its time watching videos longer than one minute (TikTok newsroom).
Teenagers and their parents disagree about how much is too much. In a fall 2025 survey, 28% of U.S. teen TikTok users said they spend too much time on it, while 44% of their parents said so about their teen (Pew Research Center).
How many people get news from short-form video?
20% of all U.S. adults regularly got news on TikTok in August 2025, up from 3% in 2020, according to Pew Research Center. Asked a narrower question, whether they had used TikTok for news in the past week, 10% of U.S. respondents and 7% of UK respondents said yes in the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026.
The news people watch there is short. 55% of people who watch news video on TikTok say they watch short videos under 2 minutes, across the Digital News Report's markets (Reuters Institute). Among UK children aged 12 to 15, TikTok was named by 42% as a way they get news, ahead of YouTube at 38% (Ofcom). Adults are less keen: in Ofcom's survey after the May 7, 2026 elections in Scotland, Wales and parts of England, 18% of adults aware of the elections preferred shorter formats such as videos and reels for election news, against 64% who preferred longer formats (Ofcom).
Who makes short-form videos?
A small minority makes most of them. In Pew Research Center's study of U.S. adults on TikTok, the most active 25% produced 98% of all publicly accessible videos from the group, and 52% had ever posted a video at all (Pew Research Center). Those figures come from accounts observed in August 2023 and are still the latest of their kind.
On YouTube, over ten million channels were publishing Shorts each day as of March 2026, Alphabet said (Q1 2026 earnings call). On Snapchat, the number of people posting to Spotlight in the U.S. grew more than 115% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, while U.S. daily viewers grew more than 20% (Snap prepared remarks). Worldwide, the number of people posting to Spotlight grew 130% year over year in the third quarter, and daily active viewers 40% (Snap Q3 2026 prepared remarks).
Age makes a large difference. In late 2025, 42% of UK social media users aged 25 to 34 said they post videos they made themselves, against 3% of those aged 75 and over (Ofcom). Among UK children surveyed in 2025-26, 36% of 13 to 17 year olds said they upload videos, against 22% of 8 to 12 year olds (Ofcom).
Editing tools are part of the platforms now. Nearly 10% of the Reels people view each day were created in Meta's Edits app, Meta said in January 2026, almost triple the share a quarter earlier (Q4 2025 earnings call).
How long can a Short, Reel or TikTok be?
As of September 2026, YouTube Shorts can be up to 3 minutes long, TikTok accepts uploads of up to 60 minutes, and Meta says reels on Facebook have no length limit, according to each platform's own help and announcement pages. Vertical 9:16 is the recommended shape on every platform that states one. How much of what big channels post is Shorts? In our check of the most-subscribed YouTube channels, 646 of their 1,484 latest uploads (44%) were Shorts.
YouTube raised the Shorts limit to 3 minutes from October 15, 2024 (YouTube Official Blog), and most songs from its audio library can be used for up to 90 seconds in a Short (YouTube Help).
Two platforms contradict themselves. Instagram's own Reels page gives 20 minutes in its FAQ and 3 minutes in its headline, and adds that reels over 3 minutes won't be recommended to new audiences (Instagram). So a long reel may be allowed but not shown to people who do not already follow you. Meta announced on June 17, 2025 that all videos on Facebook will be shared as reels (Meta newsroom), with no length limit, but its developer documentation still caps reels published through the API at 90 seconds.
For ads, Meta advises keeping text and logos out of the bottom 35% of an Instagram Reels ad, as well as the top 14% and 6% on each side, where the app's buttons and captions sit (Meta Ads Guide (archived)). No platform we checked publishes an equivalent safe zone for ordinary posts except Pinterest.
How do platforms pay creators for short-form video?
YouTube pays monetizing Shorts creators 45% of the Shorts revenue allocated to them from a shared Creator Pool, TikTok's Creator Rewards Program pays only for videos at least one minute long, and Facebook paid creators nearly $3 billion in 2025, a 35% increase on the year before (YouTube Help; Meta newsroom).
Program
Who qualifies
How the money is split
YouTube Partner Program, via Shorts (today)
1,000 subscribers and 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days (YouTube Help)
Ad revenue from the Shorts feed goes into a pool, part of it pays for music, and the rest is allocated by each creator's share of views; creators keep 45% of their allocation
YouTube expanded tier
500 subscribers, 3 public uploads and 3 million Shorts views in 90 days (YouTube Help)
Fan funding and shopping features only, no ad revenue share
YouTube, new applicants from February 1, 2027
8,000 watch hours in 365 days, or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days (YouTube Official Blog)
Every partner then needs 10 million qualified Shorts views over the last 90 days to keep earning ad and subscription revenue on Shorts; a channel below that stays in the program and keeps its long-form earnings (same post). Shorts ads that an advertiser targets at five or fewer channels pay those creators 45% of the ad’s net revenue directly, on top of the pool (YouTube Help)
Pays only for original videos at least one minute long
Facebook creator monetization
Invitation and eligibility rules set by Meta
60% of 2025 payouts went to reels, the rest to Stories, photos and text posts (Meta newsroom)
YouTube began sharing Shorts revenue on February 1, 2023, replacing the YouTube Shorts Fund (YouTube Help, archived January 2023). The 45% is a share of each creator's allocation from the pool, not of the ads that ran next to their own Shorts.
On Facebook, 60% of nearly $3 billion is roughly $1.8 billion paid for reels in 2025, by our calculation; because Meta gives the total as "nearly" $3 billion, that is a ceiling. Meta's earlier figure, more than $2 billion, covered the twelve months to October 2024, not calendar 2024 (Meta newsroom). YouTube says it paid over $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies in the four years to January 2026, across all formats, not Shorts alone (YouTube CEO letter, 2026).
How much money does short-form video make?
Meta said Reels reached an annual revenue run rate of over $50 billion in October 2025, up from more than $10 billion in July 2023 (Q3 2025 earnings call; Q2 2023 earnings call). A run rate is a recent period scaled up to a year, not reported revenue, and neither Meta nor Alphabet breaks out short-form revenue in its filings.
The filed totals give the scale. Meta's advertising revenue was $196,175 million in 2025 (Meta Form 10-K). YouTube's ads revenue, all formats, was $40,367 million in 2025, up about 11.7% on 2024 by our calculation (Alphabet Form 10-K), and $11,207 million in the third quarter of 2026 (Alphabet Q3 2026 earnings release).
Shorts used to earn YouTube much less per hour watched than long-form video, and the gap has closed in the U.S. The U.S. monetization rate of Shorts relative to in-stream viewing rose by more than 30 percentage points during 2024 (Alphabet Q4 2024 call), and by October 2025 Alphabet said that in the U.S., Shorts now earn more revenue per watch hour than traditional in-stream viewing (Alphabet Q3 2025 call). That is YouTube's revenue per hour, not what creators are paid.
Advertisers' spending is measured by the IAB and its national counterparts, each with its own method:
Market
What is measured
Figure
Source
United States
Social media ad revenue, 2025, reported by sellers
The U.S. rows are not additive. The $117.7 billion and $78 billion come from the same seller-reported census and overlap, while the $31.9 billion is a buy-side estimate built from agency billing data with a different definition of social video. IAB's U.S. "social video" includes YouTube, so none of these is a short-form-only total. No official body publishes one.
What do marketers and consumers tell surveys about short-form video?
In HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing survey of more than 1,500 marketers, 48.6% put short-form video among their top three formats for return on investment, the largest share for any format (HubSpot). HubSpot sells marketing software, its public pages give no field dates, and the question asks for a top-three ranking, not a measured return. In the same survey, over 60% of companies said they use short-form video (HubSpot), and 30% of marketers picked it as the format they plan to invest in most in 2026 (HubSpot).
In Wyzowl's late-2025 survey of 266 respondents, 71% said videos between 30 seconds and 2 minutes are the most effective (Wyzowl). Wyzowl sells explainer video production. Sprout Social, which sells social media software, found in October 2025 that 48% of 2,305 social media users in the U.S., UK and Australia are most likely to interact with brands' short-form video (under 60 seconds) on Facebook, ahead of text posts at 32% (Sprout Social).
A survey that is not run by a vendor gives the budget context. U.S. marketing leaders spent 14.3% of their marketing budgets on social media in January 2026, according to The CMO Survey, run by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association.
What the popular short-form video numbers really say
Most short-form video statistics in circulation come from roundups that copy each other. We traced the most repeated ones to the earliest document we could date. Several are out of date, several measure something other than what they are quoted for, and a few have no source at all.
"TikTok has 1.5 billion (or 1.6, or 1.9 billion) monthly users"
TikTok has not published a higher worldwide monthly user figure since September 27, 2021, when it said more than 1 billion people came to TikTok every month. In January 2024 its CEO told the U.S. Senate that TikTok was a community of "more than a billion people worldwide", including well over 170 million Americans.
The larger totals do not come from TikTok. The most common, around 1.5 to 1.6 billion, is TikTok's advertising "potential reach" among adults aged 18 and over, as reported by ByteDance's ad tools and compiled in DataReportal's Digital 2025 report under the heading of advertising audiences. Ad reach counts the people an advertiser can target, not monthly active users. The 1.9 billion version we followed ends at a market-research reseller's ranking. TikTok's European figures have the same problem in miniature: its more than 200 million covers 32 countries including the UK, while its EU-only figure is 189 million.
What to use instead: TikTok's own dated figures for a named country or region, in the user count table, each with its denominator.
"YouTube Shorts get 70 billion (or 200 billion) views a day" and "Reels get 200 billion plays"
All three are real, but they are routinely quoted with the wrong date. YouTube's 70 billion was first said on Alphabet's October 24, 2023 earnings call, so it describes late 2023. Its 200 billion was first announced on June 18, 2025, after YouTube began counting a Shorts view every time a Short starts to play, with no minimum watch time. Meta's 200 billion daily Reels plays dates from July 2023, and we found no newer daily plays figure from Meta. Placing YouTube's 2025 number next to Meta's 2023 number, as many comparisons do, compares two different years and two different ways of counting.
The same applies to users. "Shorts has 2 billion monthly users" was first stated in July 2023 and repeated in October 2023, counts logged-in users only, and is still the latest such figure we found from YouTube or Alphabet.
"Short-form video has the highest ROI of any format"
This began as an investment-intent figure, not a return. HubSpot's 2022 Marketing Industry Trends Report, published in November 2021 from a survey of 1,067 marketers, found that 30% of social media marketers planned to invest more in short-form video than in any other social media strategy in 2022 (HubSpot, archived). A July 2022 HubSpot blog post then turned the same 30% into a claim about return: "Short-form video has the highest ROI of any social media marketing strategy as 30% of social media marketers plan to invest in it more than any other trend in 2022" (HubSpot, archived).
Later editions asked about ROI directly, but in different ways. In HubSpot's 2025 report, 21% of more than 1,700 marketers named short-form video when asked which formats deliver the highest ROI, the top answer but far from a majority (HubSpot, archived). The 2026 edition asked for a top three, and 48.6% put short-form video in it. That is a different question, so the two cannot be compared as growth. None of these surveys measured return on investment. They record what marketers believe, in surveys run by a company that sells marketing software.
What to use instead: "21% of marketers named short-form video as the format delivering the highest ROI, more than any other format (HubSpot, 2025)", with the caveat that it is self-reported.
"73% of consumers prefer short-form video to learn about a product"
The number is Wyzowl's, from its 2022 edition, and the answer it counts is "a short video", offered alongside options such as text-based articles. The question does not mention Reels, Shorts or TikTok. Wyzowl makes explainer videos, counts marketers and consumers in one respondent total, and does not publish the size of the consumer group or the countries surveyed. Its answer to the same question has moved sharply from edition to edition:
Wyzowl edition
Survey
Respondents (all)
Would most like to learn about a product from a short video
That is a swing of 34 percentage points between consecutive editions, with samples as small as 205 people, which says more about the samples than about consumers. An older Wyzowl question from 2016, whether users would rather watch video than read text when both are on the same page, produced 69% (Wyzowl, archived); that is sometimes merged into the same claim.
What to use instead: the current edition's figure with its sample size and its wording, "a short video", or an independent survey such as Ofcom's finding that 18% of adults aware of the May 2026 UK elections preferred shorter formats for election news.
"Short-form videos get 2.5x more engagement than long-form"
This is a stated preference, not a measurement of engagement. It comes from the Sprout Social Index, Edition XVIII, a survey of 1,236 U.S. consumers fielded from February 22 to March 1, 2022, which said "consumers find short-form videos 2.5x more engaging than long-form videos" (Sprout Social). The ratio compares the shares of respondents who named each format among the most engaging kinds of social content. As it was repeated through other companies' blogs and reports it became "2.5 times more engagement", and one 2026 roundup now says videos under 60 seconds "generate 2.5x more engagement per impression than any other content type", with no source. No platform or independent study we found measures that.
"Vertical video ads get 9x (or 90%) higher completion"
The 9x appears in Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2015 presentation, credited to Snapchat: full-screen vertical video ads on Snapchat had a 9x higher completion rate than horizontal mobile video ads, measured against industry-standard horizontal ads as measured by Nielsen (KPCB, archived). No sample, period or test design was published, and as described it compares Snapchat's ads with an industry benchmark rather than testing the same ad both ways. It is a platform selling its own ad format, relayed by a venture investor.
The "90%" version is a different number. In a November 2016 press release announcing its own vertical ad product, MediaBrix said vertically presented video ads in its study "were completed 90 percent of the time" (MediaBrix via PR Newswire). That is a completion rate, not a 90% improvement, and no sample was published.
"88% of TikTok users say sound is vital"
TikTok's own business blog reported in June 2021 that research it commissioned from Kantar found 88% of TikTok users said sound is "essential" to the TikTok experience (TikTok For Business). In December 2021 TikTok restated it as 88% saying sound is "vital", this time footnoted to a different study, run by Nielsen in July 2020 (TikTok For Business). Both were commissioned by TikTok, neither published sample details, and both measure an attitude, not how often people actually watch with the sound on.
"The ideal TikTok length is 21 to 34 seconds"
TikTok did publish 21-34 seconds, as the recommended length for paid In-Feed ads, in a February 2022 tips sheet for advertisers based on modelling of ad performance from May to July 2021 (TikTok For Business), and an August 2021 TikTok post had already reported that 1 in 4 of its top-performing ad videos ran that long (the full trace is on our video length and retention statistics page). It was never advice for ordinary posts. TikTok has since moved the other way for creators: it says half of viewing time goes to videos longer than one minute (50%), and its Creator Rewards Program pays only for videos at least one minute long.
"Shorts can be 60 seconds and Reels 90 seconds"
Both limits are out of date. YouTube has accepted Shorts of up to 3 minutes since October 15, 2024. Instagram's own Reels page now gives 20 minutes in the app, and Meta says reels on Facebook have no length limit. The 90-second figure survives in Meta's developer documentation for reels posted through its API. See the length table for each platform's current page.
Two claims that trace to one-off estimates
"TikTok users spend 95 minutes a day on the app." This is Sensor Tower's own estimate, published on its blog in July 2022: "Globally, an average of 95 minutes were spent in TikTok per day last quarter" (Sensor Tower). The post's figures come from active Google Play installs, so it is an Android-only app-intelligence estimate for the second quarter of 2022, not a TikTok disclosure or an audience panel, and it is four years old. For a measured figure, use Ofcom's passive measurement: TikTok reached 56% of UK online adults in May 2025, and its users aged 18 to 34 spent 49 minutes a day on it.
"Reels get 22% more interaction than standard video posts." This began as a one-week snapshot of one sports league. In August 2020 the analytics firm Conviva reported that for the 20 NBA teams that posted Reels in the week after launch, engagements per Reel were 22% higher than each team's average Instagram video (SportsPro). By July 2022 a statistics roundup was repeating it with no source, and it is often credited to the scheduling company Later, whose Reels guide does not contain it.
Claims we could not trace at all
We publish no figure for any of these:
"Short-form video market size" figures. Every one we saw came from a market-research reseller's sales page with the method behind a paywall, so none is in our ledger.
We started from the questions people search for about short-form video statistics and looked for the organization that actually produced each answer. Every figure on this page sits in an evidence ledger with its source, the exact table or paragraph it came from, the measurement period, the population measured, and the date we checked it. This edition holds 144 figures from 28 publishers.
On September 22, 2026, every figure was re-fetched from its source on a cleared cache and matched against the recorded wording; all 134 sourced figures then on the page re-verified automatically. Meta's and Alphabet's earnings call transcripts were read from the PDFs their investor relations sites publish, and Meta's and Snap's filings from the SEC's EDGAR system. Pages that block automated requests, including Ofcom, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, Wyzowl, Instagram's and Facebook's help and developer pages, and TikTok's Help Center, were read from dated Internet Archive captures of the publisher's own pages. We left out TikTok's enforcement figures after March 2023, which it now publishes only on a page rendered by script and in a ZIP file we could not check automatically; HubSpot's full State of Marketing report, which sits behind a sign-up form; figures that appear only as unlabelled chart data; and every market-size estimate from a market-research reseller.
We only cite the producer: government agencies, regulators, company filings and official posts, and the survey owner's own report. We do not cite statistics roundups, Statista-style aggregators, or salary sites without a public method. We did not bypass paywalls or sign-up forms; where a full report was gated, we used only the figures its publisher states publicly.
Figures marked "our calculation" are arithmetic on the cited numbers, and anyone can reproduce them:
91,003,510 removed videos divided by a removal rate of 0.0065 gives 14.0 billion, and divided by 0.0055 gives 16.5 billion; TikTok publishes the rate rounded to 0.006, so any value from 0.0055 to 0.0065 is consistent with it
This edition contains no Mark Studios customer data.
Limitations
Most scale figures come from the platforms themselves. Daily views, user counts, time-spent shares and run rates are stated by YouTube, Alphabet, Meta, TikTok and Snap on earnings calls or in blog posts. No one audits them, and most are floors ("over", "more than").
Platforms count different things. YouTube counts logged-in users and views, Meta counts plays, TikTok counts people, monthly active recipients or Americans with no time window, and Snap counts monthly active users. YouTube also changed what counts as a Shorts view on March 31, 2025. The tables label each figure's denominator; do not rank them against each other.
Several headline numbers are old because the platforms stopped updating them. TikTok's worldwide user figure dates from 2021, Meta's last daily Reels plays figure from 2023, YouTube's last Shorts user figure from 2023, and Pew's study of who posts on TikTok uses 2023 data. Each is dated where it appears.
No filing reports short-form revenue. Meta's Reels figures are run rates, a recent period scaled up to a year, and Alphabet reports YouTube ads revenue for all formats together. IAB's U.S. social video totals include YouTube.
Marketer and consumer surveys here are mostly run by vendors. HubSpot, Wyzowl and Sprout Social sell into the market they survey. Wyzowl's samples are small (205 to 967 respondents) and mix marketers with consumers, and HubSpot publishes its field dates only behind a sign-up form.
Length and format limits are a snapshot. They were read from help, developer and announcement pages in September 2026, several through Internet Archive captures because the live pages block automated requests. Instagram's own Reels page gives two different limits, and Meta's developer documentation disagrees with its announcement for Facebook.
TikTok's EU counts are compliance figures. TikTok says they were produced for the Digital Services Act and should not be relied on for other purposes.
Most survey data describe the U.S., the UK and Australia. Figures for other countries come from the platforms or from the Reuters Institute's multi-country survey.
How to cite this page
For a single figure, cite the original publisher named next to it, and link here if the verification trail is useful to your readers. Each figure has its own anchor, so you can link straight to it, for example https://www.markstudios.com/research/short-form-video-statistics#YTS-006. To cite the page as a whole:
Mark Studios. "Short-Form Video Statistics." Last verified Oct 1, 2026. https://www.markstudios.com/research/short-form-video-statistics
APA
Mark Studios. (2026, October 1). Short-form video statistics. https://www.markstudios.com/research/short-form-video-statistics
MLA
“Short-Form Video Statistics.” Mark Studios, 1 Oct. 2026, www.markstudios.com/research/short-form-video-statistics.
Chicago
Mark Studios. “Short-Form Video Statistics.” Last modified October 1, 2026. https://www.markstudios.com/research/short-form-video-statistics.
BibTeX
@misc{markstudios_short_form_video_statistics_2026,
author = {{Mark Studios}},
title = {{Short-Form Video Statistics}},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
url = {https://www.markstudios.com/research/short-form-video-statistics},
note = {Last verified 2026-10-01}
}
Our calculations and the evidence table are free to reuse with attribution and a link to this page. Each underlying figure remains the claim of its original publisher, and some publishers ask for a link when their figures are reused.
We re-verify every figure quarterly and when a major source publishes a new edition. The next scheduled review is December 2026. Corrections go to contact@markstudios.com.
Sep 22, 2026: First published with 140 figures from 26 publishers, each checked against its original source.
Sep 24, 2026: SSRS, the site that hosts Edison Research's reports, stopped serving them. 1 citation now points to Edison's own copy of the same report or to an archived copy of the page, and each figure was re-checked there.
Sep 28, 2026: Traced two claims we had listed as untraceable. The TikTok "95 minutes a day" figure is Sensor Tower's own July 2022 estimate from Android installs, and the Reels "22% more interaction" figure is Conviva's August 2020 one-week analysis of 20 NBA teams. Neither is a general benchmark.
Oct 1, 2026: Re-checked all 136 sourced figures against their sources in our scheduled re-verification; none had changed.
Oct 24, 2026: Updated the Nielsen TV-viewing figures to The Gauge for August 2026, released October 22, the last month before Nielsen's one-time methodology change; July's figures are kept in the evidence table's notes.
Oct 29, 2026: Moved YouTube's quarterly ad revenue to Q3 2026 ($11,207 million, from Alphabet's Q3 2026 earnings release).
Oct 31, 2026: Dated the Pew teen TikTok figures to its fall 2025 survey and the Ofcom posting and upload figures to its late 2025 and 2025-26 surveys. Added YouTube’s other February 1, 2027 Shorts change, a 45% direct share on Shorts ads targeted at five or fewer channels, and noted that a channel below the 10 million view minimum stays in the program.
Nov 5, 2026: Added Snap's third-quarter 2026 Spotlight figures (people posting up 130% and daily active viewers up 40% worldwide) next to its second-quarter U.S. figures.
Frequently asked questions
How many views do YouTube Shorts get per day?
YouTube says Shorts average over 200 billion daily views, a figure its CEO Neal Mohan first announced on June 18, 2025. The previous figure, over 70 billion, was given in October 2023. On March 31, 2025, YouTube began counting a Shorts view every time a Short starts to play or replays, with no minimum watch time, so the two figures are not directly comparable.
How many people use TikTok?
TikTok's worldwide figure is more than 1 billion people a month, unchanged since September 2021. In the U.S., its CEO said well over 170 million Americans used it every month in January 2024, and the U.S. joint venture said in January 2026 that more than 200 million Americans use it, without giving a time window. Surveys measure shares instead: 37% of U.S. adults used TikTok in 2025, according to Pew Research Center.
How long can a YouTube Short, Instagram Reel or TikTok be?
YouTube Shorts can be up to 3 minutes long. TikTok allows up to 10 minutes recorded in the app and up to 60 minutes uploaded. Instagram's Reels page says clips recorded in the app can add up to 20 minutes, but reels over 3 minutes are not recommended to new audiences. Meta says reels on Facebook have no length or format restrictions.
How do YouTube Shorts creators get paid?
Ad revenue from the Shorts feed is pooled, part of it covers music licensing, and the rest is split by each creator's share of views. Monetizing creators keep 45% of their allocation. To join the YouTube Partner Program through Shorts, a channel needs 1,000 subscribers and 10 million qualified Shorts views in 90 days. From February 1, 2027, new applicants will need 20 million Shorts views in 90 days or 8,000 watch hours in a year. From that date, every partner also needs 10 million qualified Shorts views over the last 90 days to earn Shorts ad and subscription revenue each month, and creators keep 45% of the net revenue from Shorts ads targeted at five or fewer channels.
Does short-form video have the highest ROI?
No survey measures it. In HubSpot's 2025 report, 21% of marketers named short-form video as the format delivering the highest ROI, more than any other format, and in the 2026 edition 48.6% put it in their top three. Both record marketers' opinions in surveys run by a marketing software company. The claim began in 2022 as a figure about plans: 30% of social media marketers planned to invest more in short-form video than in any other strategy.
How much time do people spend on short-form video?
Meta said Reels made up 50% of time spent on Instagram in April 2024, and video of all kinds more than 60% of time on Facebook and Instagram. Snap says Spotlight is more than 40% of the time people spend watching content on Snapchat. In the UK, Ofcom measured TikTok reaching 56% of online adults in May 2025, with its users aged 18 to 34 spending 49 minutes a day on it.
What aspect ratio should short-form video be?
Vertical 9:16. Instagram recommends 9:16 for reels, Snapchat says its content is 9:16, and Meta recommends 1080 x 1920 pixels for Facebook reels. YouTube accepts Shorts in a square or vertical aspect ratio and does not publish a recommended resolution for them.
How often is this page updated?
Every figure is re-checked against its original source each quarter, and sooner when a platform announces a new milestone or changes its length or pay rules. The Last verified date changes only after that check, and each change is recorded in the change log.
