TikTok Pushes Long-Form Video

The originators of the short-attention-span video are now pushing for long-form video. It's no secret that TikTok has allowed ten-minute videos for some time, while YouTube Shorts is still stuck with a 60-second limit.

The logic behind the short video is that people these days have no attention span. Who wants to sit through a ten-minute video when they can get what they need in a minute?


Well, according to TikTok, longer video content looks like a trend. At a creator event in October, TikTok told the crowd that users now spend "half their time on the app watching videos longer than 60 seconds." Furthermore, during the previous six months, creators posting videos longer than one minute were treated to five times more followers than those old-school creators still stuck on posting videos under a minute.

In light of this surprising turn of events, TikTok is doubling down on long-form video by raising the limit to fifteen minutes. Don't get excited. This new video length is still being tested.

To further encourage longer videos, the platform is moving away from its $1 billion creator fund to a shiny new monetization method. The new one will only reward creators for videos longer than a minute. It's not good news for those creators who like it short and sweet.

TikTok is not famous for being transparent about the methods used to measure what constitutes a view. A single view might mean a user viewed a video for ten seconds. Maybe it's based on a percentage of a video's watch time. Heck, for all we know, TikTok could count a user scrolling past a video and thinking about viewing it as a view. Whatever the case, we're taking TikTok's word for it.

The one metric we can reasonably believe tells us TikTok users want longer-form content is the 5x growth the platform's long-form creators scored over short-form creators. This tells us that viewers are ready for longer videos.

Does that mean attention spans are increasing, and longer videos will become a trend? It's hard to say, but TikTok is placing its bet now.

Want to read this in Spanish? Spanish Version >>