Short Video Is Eating the Marketing Budget

Sit in a marketing budget meeting this year and you will hear the same argument. Someone wants to move money out of search and into short video. Ten years ago that would have been a strange request; today it is the safe one. The numbers behind it are now large enough that finance teams have stopped treating vertical clips as an experiment and started treating them as a line item.

The scale is easy to miss, because it hides inside platforms you already know. Alphabet reported YouTube advertising revenue of about 36 billion dollars for 2024. YouTube has said its Shorts feed averages more than 70 billion daily views. On its late-2023 earnings call, Meta said Reels had passed an annual revenue run rate of 10 billion dollars, up from 3 billion a year earlier. TikTok passed a billion monthly users back in 2021.

Three things make the format cheap to buy. The clips are short, so a viewer meets more ads per minute. The feed is ranked by interest rather than by who you follow, so a small brand can reach strangers without buying an audience first. And production costs collapsed: a phone, a face and forty seconds now beat a studio shoot in plenty of categories.

The catch is what the format rewards. A system that ranks by watch time will favour whatever holds attention in the first two seconds, and that is not always the thing that sells. Brands report strong view counts next to flat sales, then argue for months about whether the video failed or the tracking did. Both answers are usually a little true.

There is also a volume problem. A television spot could run for a year. A short video burns out in days, so teams need dozens of variants a month simply to hold the same reach. Agencies that once sold one big idea now sell a content pipeline, and the marketing team quietly turns into a small studio with deadlines every week.

Smaller companies feel both sides of this. The entry cost is close to nothing, and a founder who can talk to a camera can test three messages in a week. But attention here is rented, not owned. When the ranking changes, a page that reached two hundred thousand people in March can reach eight thousand in June, with nothing on your side changed.

So what should you ask before you move the budget? Two questions do most of the work. First: if we stopped posting for one month, what would actually fall — views, or orders? Second: what does one video really cost us, including the hours nobody logs? Short video is not going away, and refusing it is not a strategy. But a channel you cannot measure is a channel that will keep asking for more money.