The vertical video takeover is here

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app. All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather…