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​Let met ell you the most challenging part of my job. Often, I will delete TikTok and Instagram from my phone because I can't help but waste time endlessly scrolling through these apps, watching dozens of short-form videos in one sitting. And I’m not the only one.

According to HubSpot’s 2025 Marketing Trends Report, visual storytelling is the new norm. Short-form video content leads the way, with 29.18% of marketers identifying it as the most used format and 21.02% citing it as delivering the highest ROI.

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So, why are short-form videos so popular? Turns out there are a few reasons, one of which involved a bit of psychology. Let's get into it!

Table of Contents

• What are short-form videos?
• Why are short-form videos so popular?
• Why Brands Should Use Short-Form Video Content

What are short-form videos?

Short-form videos are videos that are less than 60 seconds in duration. However, some marketers and content creators agree that short-form videos can be up to 3 minutes. But, if you want my opinion, I would stick to the 60-second rule.

I take this stance because attention spans are getting shorter, but we'll get into that later.

Anyway, short-form videos deliver information in a digestible, bite-size format so viewers can quickly watch and bookmark the content if they're on the go or watch it multiple times.

And, if you’re going to make your content longer than 60 seconds, try to front-load all the important stuff early into the video to make sure more people see what matters most.

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Why are short-form videos so popular?

There are a few reasons short-form videos are more popular than ever among consumers and marketers, and I‘ll visit those in a bit. For now, I want to get into the psychology of it all — that’s why we're here, right? Walk with me.

Consumer attention spans are shrinking.

Science tells us that one of the crucial reasons we love short-form videos is that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.

Dr. Gloria Mark, a psychologist, recently wrote a book called Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity, and she says her research indicates people's attention spans have been shrinking over the last 20 years.

Dr. Mark shared her findings on Speaking of Psychology, an American Psychological Association podcast.

Her findings came from a decades-long experiment she participated in, which was first conducted by shadowing participants and tracking their activities via stopwatches.

“We would record the start time and the stop time,” she explains.

“So you‘re on a screen where you’re working in a Word doc. As soon as you get to that screen, we click start time. As soon as they turned away and checked the email, we clicked stop time for the Word document and start time for the email,” Mark adds.

Over time, logging techniques became more sophisticated as technology advanced, and it only made the pattern of shrinking attention spans clearer.

“Back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average,” Dr. Mark recalls during the interview. “Throughout the years, it became shorter. So around 2012, we found it to be 75 seconds.”