Korean teens watch online videos 3 hours daily, half view short-form content every day
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South Korean teenagers are now spending more than three hours a day watching online video content on platforms like YouTube and Instagram Reels. The data reveals a significant surge in the consumption of short-form videos, while traditional television viewership among adolescents has dropped sharply.
According to the "Tweens' and Teens' Media Use 2025" released by the Korea Press Foundation on Wednesday, these findings are based on a survey of 2,674 students ranging from fourth grade elementary school students to seniors in high school, conducted between June and September of last year.
When asked about platforms or services used in the past week, 95.1 percent of respondents said they had used online video platforms — the second-highest rate after internet portals (95.7 percent). The daily average viewing time for the total respondent pool was 200.6 minutes, or approximately 3.3 hours. Middle school students spent the most time glued to screens at 233.7 minutes, followed by high school students (226.2 minutes) and elementary school students (143.6 minutes).
The most frequently watched genres included games (63.9 percent), music/performance/dance (50.6 percent) and cooking/eating (40.6 percent). In terms of frequently used platforms, Instagram Reels topped the list at 37.2 percent, followed by YouTube (35.8 percent), YouTube Shorts (16.5 percent), TikTok (8.0 percent) and Naver Clip (1.3 percent).
"While YouTube still holds the highest rate for simple usage experience, Instagram Reels has overtaken YouTube among most frequently used platforms," the report noted. "The trend in online video consumption among teenagers appears to have shifted from long-form to short-form content."
The shift toward shorter formats is stark. When asked how often they watched short-form content in the past week, 49.1 percent of respondents said they watched it every day — a dramatic increase from just 0.2 percent in the 2022 survey.
The survey also found that 67.6 percent of respondents use conversational or generative artificial intelligence tools, a new category that was added to last year's survey.
In contrast, traditional media consumption continues to wane. The percentage of teenagers who said they had watched television in the past week stood at 84.8 percent last year, a drop of 12.6 percentage points from the 2022 survey.
This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.