How Short Form Video is Driving Ad-Revenue for Media Companies

The business case for on-platform vertical video is no longer theoretical. Publishers implementing dedicated video feeds are reporting measurable gains in both engagement and revenue. Advertisers are paying attention.

The Revenue Signal

Time's COO Mark Howard told Digiday that vertical video is "the biggest growth driver" for the business in 2026, with video ads selling at 25-40% higher CPMs than standard display formats.^[1] The reason, Howard says, is that engagement time on video far exceeds what publishers see from text-based content.

That premium isn't an outlier. Vertical clips under 60 seconds are delivering approximately 2.5x higher engagement rates, according to the same report.^[1] When CNN launched its vertical "Shorts" feed in November, they observed that users watching video spend far more time on the platform, and that watch time directly drives ad inventory value.

What Publishers Are Seeing

According to Nieman Lab's November 2025 analysis, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and Newsday have all launched dedicated Watch tabs.^[2] The engagement data from early implementations:

• Newsday: ~30% of users open the video tab nearly daily; vertical format now accounts for ~33% of all video views across their sites^[2]
• The Economist: Vertical video consumption more than doubled year-over-year after launching a subscribers-only video tab in March 2025^[2]
• Recurrent Ventures: Average watch time doubled from 6.5 to 13 minutes as they shifted focus to video^[1]

Longer sessions mean more sequential ad opportunities. That's the mechanism driving CPM premiums.

Why Advertisers Pay More

The ad market is reflecting consumption behavior. Creator economy ad spend was projected to reach $37 billion in 2025, a 26% year-over-year increase growing 4x faster than overall media.^[1] Publishers bringing that format on-platform can capture direct-sold CPMs instead of the 30-50% revenue share typical of social distribution.

Time's strategy is instructive: they place vertical video after the second paragraph on most articles and monetize through both direct sales and programmatic via Media.net.^[1] The result is higher CPMs driven by engagement metrics advertisers value: completion rates, sequential viewing, and time on platform.

The Implementation Gap

Despite the opportunity, most publishers haven't launched vertical feeds yet. The New York Times is only now beta testing vertical video advertising for early 2026. Newsday is in early-stage discussions. The Economist remains ad-free on their video tab.

The constraint isn't demand. It's infrastructure. Building a high-performing vertical video feed requires video encoding pipelines, personalization logic, the right kind of vertical ad inventory insertion, and capabilities that many publishers don't have in-house.

Building Vertical Video Infrastructure

Publishers have two paths forward:

Build in-house. This requires assembling teams that understand transcoding, pre-buffering, adaptive bitrate streaming, storage optimization, latency management, and CDN architecture, all to deliver the smooth, instant-load experiences users expect from platforms like TikTok. Beyond the video infrastructure itself, you'll need personalization algorithms and recommendation engines to drive the engagement metrics that command premium CPMs.

Use existing infrastructure. Shortkit was founded by the team that helped build and scale YouTube Shorts. Shortkit's SDK and infrastructure provides everything in a box: feeds, personalization, ad insertion, and state-of-the-art performance.

Book a time with the Shortkit team →