The Second Pivot to Video (And Why This One Is Different)

In 2017, “pivot to video” became shorthand for layoffs. Fox Sports fired its entire writing staff. Mic raised $60 million and sold for $5 million. The damage was real and the skepticism it created was earned. But the problem wasn't video. It was where they built it, and whose data they trusted.

What Actually Happened

In April 2016, Mark Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed: “We're entering this new golden age of video.” Publishers believed him. They laid off writers, hired video teams, and restructured entire organizations around video content optimized for Facebook's algorithm.

They were making those decisions based on fabricated data.

In September 2016, Facebook admitted it had been miscalculating average video watch times. The initial admission put the inflation at 60–80%. A subsequent lawsuit revealed the actual range was 150–900% on some videos. The mechanism was straightforward fraud: Facebook was excluding video views under three seconds from the denominator of its average watch time calculation while keeping them in the numerator. Internal communications showed the company knew about this error as early as 2015 and waited over a year to say anything. They eventually settled for $40 million.^[1]

By then, the damage was done. The list of companies that restructured around Facebook video and suffered for it is long:

• Fox Sports eliminated its entire writing staff to focus on “premium video across all platforms.”^[2]
• Vocativ laid off its entire newsroom as part of a “strategic shift to focus exclusively on video.”^[2]
• Mic raised $60 million in venture capital, cut its staff twice for video pivots, and ultimately sold to Bustle for approximately $5 million, after Facebook views had collapsed from 192 million monthly to 11 million.^[3]
• MTV News, Mashable, Vice, Vox Media all cut staff and shifted resources toward video formats they never found audiences for.^[2]

The Columbia Journalism Review's post-mortem identified four structural failures: faulty metrics, distribution built entirely on a third-party platform, weak production infrastructure, and an inability to turn video views into actual ad revenue.^[4] The deeper problem was simpler. Publishers were building on rented land. Facebook controlled the reach, the data, and the monetization, and changed all three when it suited them.

Why It Wasn't Video's Fault

It's worth being precise about what failed, because “video doesn't work” is the wrong conclusion.

What failed was long-form horizontal video on a mobile feed where most people don't have headphones. A three-minute news package that requires you to rotate your phone and find earbuds is not a product designed for mobile consumption. It was a TV segment uploaded to Facebook. The format was mismatched with the device, the context, and how people actually use their phones.

The distribution was also entirely wrong. Every view existed at Facebook's discretion. When Facebook announced it was prioritizing “meaningful interactions” over publisher content in early 2018, the entire ecosystem that had been built around its video push collapsed overnight.

What's Different Now

TikTok figured out the right format. Short, vertical, immediate. Designed for exactly how a phone is actually held.^[5] The behavior it created is not speculative. It is documented, habitual, and platform-agnostic.

TikTok reached 1 billion monthly users faster than any social network in history, beating Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.^[6] By 2025, TikTok has an estimated 1.59 billion monthly active users. YouTube Shorts has 2 billion monthly active users. Instagram Reels has 1.8 billion.^[7]

Two-thirds of people globally access short-form video weekly, according to the Reuters Institute. In the U.S., one in five adults now regularly gets news on TikTok, up from 3% in 2020.^[8]

These are observed behaviors, not platform projections. And the near-U.S. TikTok ban in early 2025 proved something important: when the platform faced shutdown, users didn't stop watching short-form video. They moved to Reels and Shorts. The behavior is attached to the format, not the platform. That's the clearest signal we have that this time is different.

The revenue picture is categorically different too. Digital video ad spend hit $64 billion in 2024, growing nearly 80% faster than media overall, surpassing linear TV for the first time.^[9] Time magazine's video ads sell at a 25–40% premium CPM over standard display formats. The revenue is real and documented, not a projection based on platform-supplied data.

The Structural Difference Nobody Is Talking About

The most important thing that's changed isn't the format or the revenue. It's where the video lives.

In 2017, every major publisher's video strategy ran through Facebook. Today, the companies making serious video investments are building on their own platforms.

Nieman Lab, writing about the 2025 wave of publishers adding vertical video to their apps, put it directly: “This isn't the infamous ‘pivot to video’ of the 2010s, when publishers rushed to create Facebook news video teams. The publications are doubling down on news video on their own platforms.”^[10]

The Results Are Real

The New York Times launched a TikTok-style Watch tab in October 2025. Monthly video watch time on their platform had more than doubled year over year before they even opened the tab to advertisers, and they were still actively staffing up for it in early 2026.^[11] CNN launched a Shorts tab in November 2025, part of a broader digital transformation that included building a new Video News Editorial organization to coordinate video across all platforms.^[12]

The BBC saw a 30% rise in users accessing videos in-app and a 20% increase in total videos viewed after adopting short-form vertical video. Newsday reports about 30% of users open the video tab nearly every day. The Economist's vertical video consumption more than doubled in a single year.^[10]

Sports and entertainment companies are seeing the same results. The NBA added vertical short-form video to its own app and saw a 700% increase in video consumption. LaLiga added in-app stories and saw 70% more sessions and 40% more time spent. Vertical video completion rates in publisher apps sit above 50%, more than double the 21% completion rate for non-vertical formats.^[13]

These aren't projections. They are outcomes from organizations that have already shipped.

The Right Question

The mistake in 2017 was asking “should we do video?” The right question now is “where do we build it?”

Building on a platform you don't own means the audience is never really yours, the data belongs to someone else, and the economics will change whenever the platform decides they should. Building on your own platform means the audience relationship compounds. You own the data, the monetization, and the experience.

Build in-house. Assembling the infrastructure for a high-performing short-form video feed (transcoding, adaptive bitrate delivery, personalization, feed ranking, ad insertion, analytics) It takes significant engineering time and ongoing maintenance. The same capabilities that make TikTok fast and engaging don't come out of the box.

Use existing infrastructure. Shortkit was founded by the team that helped build and scale YouTube Shorts. We provide the full stack in one SDK: feeds, personalization, ad integration, and the performance infrastructure to match what users expect from best-in-class apps.

Book a time with the Shortkit team →