TikTok is wreaking havoc in the social media industry, especially in the short video segment. The platform has become very popular in recent years among Gen Z and Millenials(56% of users are between 16 and 24 years old).
TikTok started with 1-minute long video uploads and upgraded to three minutes. The ByteDance-owned app is now rolling out the ability to upload even longer videos – now up to 10 minutes.
“We’re always thinking about new ways to bring value to our community and enrich the TikTok experience. Last year, we introduced longer videos, giving our community more time to create and be entertained on TikTok. Today, we’re excited to start rolling out the ability to upload videos that are up to 10 minutes, which we hope would unleash even more creative possibilities for our creators around the world,” TikTok shared in a statement.
That is going to be the same length for videos on YouTube and IGTV, Instagram’s long-form video platform.
To increase views and engagement on its videos, TikTok has shared that 21-34 seconds long videos are more popular and perform better on the platform. TikTok goes on to add that users find it harder to concentrate on longer videos and up to 34.4% of them watch the videos at double speed.
49.2% of TikTok users said that videos longer than 1 minute are stressful.
Even though the app is opened up to 17 times on average and users spend up to 85 minutes on the app, users will prefer watching short videos.
This presumably means that very few long videos will go viral on TikTok but it’ll be interesting to see how users on the platform interact with five minute and ten minute long videos.
The short-form video format TikTok introduced made the likes of YouTube and Instagram launch rival features such as YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.
Will these rivals adopt the same approach?
TikTok Dethrones Facebook as the World’s Most Downloaded App
Instagram Reels even increased the time limit from 30 seconds to 60 seconds. YouTube is also testing defaulting to Shorts when you open the app. Meta, Facebook’s and Instagram’s parent company is feeling the heat after it reported dismal earnings and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly shared that TikTok is a threat.
While on this topic, we’re on TikTok – so go follow us to watch our five-minute videos.
