The State of Short-Form Video in 2024
Where short-form video stood by the end of 2024: a law threatening TikTok's US future, YouTube Shorts' payouts and a format gone from novelty to default.
By 2024, short-form video wasn’t a trend to evaluate anymore, it was the default format on every major platform’s home feed. The bigger question that year wasn’t whether to use it, but how to navigate a landscape that had gotten both more mature and, for one major platform, uncertain.
A law put TikTok’s US future in real doubt
In April 2024, Congress passed and President Biden signed a law requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest its US operations or face a ban from US app stores. TikTok immediately filed suit challenging the law, and the case was still working its way through the courts as the year closed. For any business with a meaningful TikTok audience, 2024 was the year platform risk stopped being theoretical.
YouTube Shorts’ monetization program had time to mature
YouTube opened ad revenue sharing to Shorts creators in February 2023. By 2024, that program had been running long enough for creators and brands to have real data on it, and Shorts had become a legitimate second, or first, channel for short-form content rather than a promotional afterthought bolted onto a YouTube channel.
Instagram let Reels run longer
Instagram extended the maximum Reels length to three minutes during 2024, a real departure from the format’s original identity as strictly short, punchy clips. It opened the door to tutorial and explainer content that previously would have needed to live on YouTube instead.
Commerce moved directly into the feed
TikTok Shop, which had launched broadly in the US in September 2023, kept growing through 2024, putting checkout directly inside the same scroll where discovery happened. For product businesses, the gap between seeing a video and buying the product got shorter than it had ever been on any of these platforms.
The easy growth window had closed
Unlike 2021 or 2022, when a new account could occasionally break through with one well-timed video, 2024’s feeds were dense with established creators, brands and, increasingly, AI-assisted content. Consistent output and genuine retention mattered more than any single clip’s luck. OpenAI’s February 2024 announcement of Sora, a text-to-video generation tool still in limited testing, signaled that AI-produced video was coming for this format too, adding a new competitive pressure that hadn’t existed in the format’s earlier years.
What this meant heading into 2025
Short-form video in 2024 was mature, commercially serious and, for the first time, politically uncertain in its biggest US market. Businesses that had built real habits around consistent posting and genuine engagement were positioned to weather whatever happened with TikTok specifically. Businesses that had built their entire presence on one platform, betting the format would stay exactly as it was, had the most to lose from a year that made clear none of this was settled.
Read next: more Content Marketing guides, the full 2024 archive or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
