The last pivot to video went very badly for news publishers who made bad decisions based largely on Facebook data that might not have been real. “News publishers’ ‘pivot to video‘ was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real for news video too,” I wrote in 2018, “even if people within those publishers doubted the trend based on their own experiences, and even as research conducted by outside organizations continued to suggest that the video trend was overblown and that news readers preferred text.”

A few years later, though, a pivot to news video appears to be having again. This time, it’s backed up by outside research — like research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which released its annual Digital News Report this week. (We always look forward to this report and covered its findings here, here, and here.) “Most audiences still prefer text because of its flexibility and control, but that doesn’t mean that video — and especially short-form video — is not becoming a much bigger part of media diets,” the authors write. “Across countries, two-thirds (66%) say they access a short news video, which we defined as a few minutes or less, at least once a week, again with higher levels outside the U.S. and Western Europe. Almost nine in ten of the online population in Thailand (87%), access short-form videos weekly, with half (50%) saying they do this every day. Americans access a little less often (60% weekly and 20% daily), while the British consume the least short-form news (39% weekly and just 9% daily).”

Are people watching these short news videos on publishers’ websites??! LOL, no. As RISJ’s Nic Newman wrote in a piece for us, almost all consumption (72%) of these videos is on third-party platforms like YouTube and TikTok. They watch mainstream publishers’ content there, but they watch a lot of competing news video, too:

Few people — just 4% across the 47 countries RISJ surveyed — use online video as their only source of news. But, the report’s authors note, “for most publishers the shift towards video presents a difficult balancing act. How can they take advantage of a format that can engage audiences in powerful ways, including younger ones, while developing meaningful relationships — and businesses — on someone else’s platform?” It’s a question publishers have grappled with before, but this time it’s a problem based on an actual trend.