According to the “2025 Youth Media Use Survey” by the Korea Press Foundation, Korean teenagers watch online video content such as YouTube and Instagram Reels for an average of more than three hours a day.
The foundation said on the 7th that 95.1% of the total 2,674 elementary school seniors surveyed had experience using video platforms within the past week, and their average daily viewing time reached 200.6 minutes. In particular, middle school students watched the longest at 233.7 minutes per day, followed by high school and elementary school students at 226.2 minutes and 143.6 minutes. The contents enjoyed by teenagers were games (63.9%), music, performance and dance (50.6%), and cooking and eating shows (40.6%).
It was notable that Instagram Reels was 37.2 percent higher than YouTube (35.8 percent) in the ranking of the platform. This shows that the center of youth’s media consumption has completely moved from long form, a long video, to short form, a short video. Only 0.2 percent of respondents said they watched short form content every day at the time of the 2022 survey, but the survey surged to 49.1 percent. It was followed by YouTube shorts (16.5%), TikTok (8.0%), and Naver Clip (1.3%).
KakaoTalk (47.3 percent) and Instagram direct messages (47.2 percent) showed similar ratios of messenger services. Elementary school students are more likely to use KakaoTalk (81.0 percent) because they are older than 14 years old, but middle and high school students use Instagram DMs 57.3 percent and 64.4 percent, respectively. Instagram (87.1 percent) was also the most popular social networking service used by teenagers.
JENNIFER KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
