In 2018 there was an unexpected revolution in social networks. TikTok, the platform that sparked the fever for short videos, did not stop growing. Its conception was a further twist to the brief – and usually ephemeral – content that we wanted to share, which from text (blogs, Facebook, Twitter) and images (Instagram) also began to conquer video.
In reality we already had ways to share video, of course. YouTube had been an institution for the “creator economy” for years, but TikTok managed to propose a new model in which the user could enjoy very short videos. Doomscrolling also came to this format.
The overwhelming success of TikTok allowed it to win the battle of social networks and made the rest of the platforms copy the model. All the big social networks adapted it to their format: Instagram wanted to stop being Instagram with Reels and YouTube triumphs (more or less) now with its Shorts, and suddenly the internet was flooded with short videos.
New: TikTok users now spend 50% of their time watching videos longer than 1 minute, according to a presentation given to creators last month.
More on the short-form video app's quiet push into longer videos in my latest story: https://t.co/tCqc2SgLbT pic.twitter.com/oXmM8B6BTw
— Kaya Yurieff (@kyurieff) November 27, 2023
The curious thing is that while the rest of the world copied TikTok, TikTok began the opposite path.
His videos were getting longer and longer.
This was reflected very well by Kaya Yurieff, a journalist at The Information, who published a topic there confirming a trend that has been going on for a long time. The company, which in mid-2018 allowed 15-second videos to be uploaded, raised that limit to one minute before the end of that year.
Things stayed that way until the summer of 2021 when TikTok allowed creators to upload videos of up to three minutes. Six months later, in March 2022, things went further: it was now possible to upload 10-minute videos.
What did TikTok want to achieve with that? Exactly: becoming increasingly a direct rival to YouTube—and attracting more and more creators to earn extra income—in that type of content. It was and is a kind of revenge served on a cold plate: if YouTube had appropriated short videos, TikTok was now appropriating videos with the traditional YouTube format.
The confirmation comes now, when we learn that TikTok is already experimenting with—heresy!—horizontal videos, with being able to view them in full screen and even raising the maximum duration to a surprising 15 minutes.
These are all measures aimed at creating a platform that is no longer just about short videos, but also wants to attract creators who need more time to tell what they want to say.
It is a risky bet that we have already seen in the relatively short life of the rest of the social networks that dominate our lives. All of them focused on a type of content and format, but then they have adapted to new times and, above all, to the threats posed by their rivals. If someone did something new and different, they all ended up copying it, whether it was a good idea or not. For example, let’s remember that LinkedIn signed up for Stories and then admitted the mistake.
TikTok now seems to be doing something like this: having won the short video war, it has now become gluttonous and seems to want to go after YouTube, an absolute institution that it could nevertheless end up threatening. Short videos may have us glued to the screen thanks to the aforementioned ‘doomscrolling’, but increasingly longer videos are gaining ground on TikTok.
At stake are things like advertising revenue and the increasingly interesting subscription revenue. Here TikTok, yes, has an asset in its favor: that TikTok generation of young people (and not so young) whom the platform has definitively conquered.