Tube Trends: Over 75% Of YouTube Views Came From Shorts In 2025

Jan 6

The proliferation of short-format social videos is nothing new — even in this space, where it’s been covered regularly.

Yet, new data points arrive all the time to show us just how much video content is trending toward shorter videos to match shorter attention spans.

Tubular Labs reveals that 77% of global YouTube views in 2025 came via videos that were less than a minute long (and primarily in the Shorts vertical format). That number is up significantly year-over-year, from 70% in 2024, and even more so from 2023, when Shorts accounted for 66% of views on the platform.

And Shorts didn’t just gain from a share-of-voice perspective. They also soared in terms of just a raw number of views.

Tubular found that views for videos under one minute long have soared, from 24.5 trillion in 2023 to 41.5 trillion in 2025. For 2025 alone, 27 trillion of those views came from videos that were between one and 30 seconds long.

In the U.S., the split was pretty similar to global norms (in part because the U.S. is the largest video creator in the world). On the year, 77.4% of 77.4% of views on U.S. YouTube videos last year were on videos under a minute long.

Shorts views aren’t just borrowing from mid-length videos, either. “Longs” (videos running 20 minutes or longer) are seeing their respective share of views dip as well. Those videos have declined from 6.98% of all YouTube views in 2023 to just 4.08% last year. Share of total views for videos from two minutes long to 20 minutes long have effectively been cut in half over the past three years.

These ideas are true across most YouTube categories and geographies, though there are some exceptions. Most notably, U.S. media companies have splits that more resemble splits from a few years ago.

Just 44% of views for U.S. media companies came from videos that were under one minute long, and 16% of views came on videos 20+ minutes long — or four times the overall total for those longer videos.

Media companies were also embracing YouTube for entirely different reasons compared to creators and brands in 2025.

While creators and brands are looking for eyeballs, they’re largely using social video to sell. Contending with fleeting attention, many of those accounts are accomplishing this with upload volume and playing to an algorithm that primarily seems to favor shorter formats. It’s top-of-funnel format made to provide an introduction to those brands and creators, to borrow from a recent interview I had with basketball creator Agent 00 touching on how he uses short-form video.

Where the dynamic has changed recently, though, is that for many creators and brands, there’s little-to-no larger offering to invite these audiences into, beyond similar Shorts.

The result conceivably makes it tougher to earn lasting attention, as the content is all siloed and perishable by default.

Some larger creator accounts are still managing to use Shorts as top-of-funnel, though; In 2025, MrBeast was not overly Shorts focused and also uploaded fewer videos than his peers), yet averaged over 200 million views per upload on YouTube.

As a result, MrBeast is behaving far more like a media company than other creators, in part because he is a media company by himself.

Media companies living entirely off Shorts would be less likely to convert those audiences into long-form viewers — where they still make the most money via ad-supported television and streaming, plus theatrical releases, where applicable.

Since it’s tougher to get viewers to jump from a social platform promo to a separate service, the simpler solution for many has been to lean into YouTube’s widespread popularity on televisions and just upload full episodes, extended segments, entire movies, and even entire days of programming for viewers to watch live.

The last option has become a popular one for news networks like Fox News and CNN, given how frequently many viewers will simply have the news up all day. Fox News had 59 different videos last year that ran for six hours or longer.

So even as Shorts have completely taken over the battle for raw “views” on YouTube, watch-time and attention aren’t necessarily wins for short-form video just yet. And as YouTube and other platforms become even larger homes for media companies on a part-time basis, it could mean a platform-wide shift back toward longer videos as a bigger part of the footprint again.