"YouTube Empire" Shaken, Now the Reign of Reels... Teen Media Power Shift

Instagram Overtakes YouTube as Most Frequently Used Platform
Middle and High School Students Prefer DM; TV Viewing Drops by 12 Percentage Points

The unwritten rule in the IT industry-"YouTube for videos, KakaoTalk for chatting"-has been broken among teenagers. For teens who spend more than three hours a day on their smartphones, YouTube has been pushed aside as a "search tool," and provocative "short-form videos" have started to take its place.

According to the "2025 Teenage Media Usage Survey" released by the Korea Press Foundation on January 7, the average daily online video viewing time among teenagers is 200.6 minutes (about 3 hours and 20 minutes). In particular, middle school students had the highest media dependency, spending 233.7 minutes per day.

The biggest change is the shift in "platform dominance." In a survey of platforms most frequently used by teenagers, Instagram Reels (37.2%) overtook the previously unrivaled YouTube (35.8%) for the first time. Considering that only 0.2% of respondents said they watched short-form videos "every day" in the 2022 survey just three years ago, last year's figure of 49.1% demonstrates that short-form videos have become the "standard grammar" for teenagers.

The way teenagers communicate has also changed. KakaoTalk, once considered the "national messenger," is no longer essential for teens. More than half of middle and high school students, excluding elementary schoolers (57.3% of middle schoolers and 64.4% of high schoolers), chose Instagram DM (Direct Message) as their main channel for conversations instead of KakaoTalk. As a result, both video consumption and communication among friends now take place within a single app-Instagram.

There is also a clear trend toward not just watching, but producing content themselves. 30.3% of respondents said they had uploaded videos they filmed themselves online. In contrast, the decline of legacy media like TV has accelerated. The weekly TV viewing rate dropped to 84.8%, a sharp decline of 12.6 percentage points compared to three years ago, pushing TV further out of the interest of teenagers.

The report stated, "The axis of media consumption among teenagers has completely shifted from long-form to short-form, and from text-based to image-based communication," adding, "This is not just a simple trend, but the beginning of a seismic shift in the media ecosystem."