In the DC Comic “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” Harvey Dent says “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” and no other company is doing that like TikTok shifting from vertical video to horizontal video.
The ByteDance-owned company shot to popularity during the pandemic with its short form full-screen vertical format videos that made other social media rivals like Instagram and YouTube launch their versions as Reels and Shorts respectively. Now TikTok is circling back and is pivoting to becoming YouTube with these two new features.
Now Read: Instagram Reels Continue Struggling Against TikTok
TikTok is now enticing creators to make horizontal video content and the platform will boost their videos for more views within three days of posting horizontal videos longer than a minute long. The boost in views is only for creators who have been active on TikTok for at least three months.
Another restriction is that the videos should be promotional content or with political themes.
Now Read: TikTok Begins Shift From Vertical Video
Switching the format to landscape isn’t the only way TikTok is coming for YouTube’s lunch, they’re also testing the ability to upload videos up to 30 minutes.
The company started increasing the video length from a minute to three minutes to 10 minutes to 15 minutes and now the maximum time limit is 30 minutes as one of the content options.
It’s worth noting that Douyin, the China-only version of TikTok already had 30-minute videos since 2022 and they’ve had good experience with this time limit and ByteDance is bringing that ability to creators across the globe.
Increasing the video time limit means that TikTok can now start putting pre and midroll ads in the video which leads to better monetization for the videos benefiting both the app and the creators in terms of revenue sharing.
Now Read: TikTok Leads the Way in Brand Advertising Thanks to Gen Z Appeal
The question that remains is whether users have the attention span to watch 30-minute TikTok videos – and this comes from personal experience – the three-minute videos ruined me for 10-minute videos on YouTube cause I’m scrubbing through the timeline towards the end of the video.
