After teasing their interest in longer-form videos last week, TikTok confirmed today (Feb. 28) that it will allow users to upload videos up to 10 minutes long. That's a major bump up from both the three-minute maximum previously available to users and the five-minute videos the platform had been beta testing.
Sentiment in the Mashable newsroom Slack is "why?" and "who asked for this?" — and the general consensus is that even a three-minute video is already too long. There's a kind of infectious rhythm to flipping through TikTok that is thrown off by longer form content. As Deputy Entertainment Editor Kristy Puchko put it, "I get (arguably) irrationally angry when I get hit with a 3-min TikTok." Based on a quick search for related tweets, Twitter users seem to agree.
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If TikTok was built on addictive, snappy, and snackable videos, why does it need to compete in long form content, too? The answer, as always, is money. As Wired reported last week, "TikTok has ridden the wave of popularity [but] to sustainably grow its revenue, it needs longer videos, which gain more attention, and allow them to sell more ads."
YouTube has prioritized "watch time" as a metric since 2012, claiming it would phase out the prevalence of clickbaity thumbnails and reward "videos that actually kept viewers engaged." That might be true, but the change also multiplied the amount of available ad real estate, and may have led to higher rates of burnout amongst creators trying to keep up with producing more content.
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But there is still a huge difference in how the two platforms pay creators for their content. YouTube's industry-leading revenue split is far more equitable than TikTok's current monetization program and highly publicized but finite Creator Fund, which endemic video creator Hank Green recently opined was "dramatically under-paying creators." Other star creators, like MrBeast, agreed.
As of now, it doesn't look like longer-form content will be monetized any differently than the bite-sized videos that make up the majority of the platform.
