First there was TikTok (and even before Musical.ly, but that’s another story), with its 59-second long videos. Then the most popular social platform of the moment allowed the upload of clips up to 3 minutes long, chased by YouTube, which opened a Shorts section in an attempt to counter it. Now, vice versa, TikTok enters YouTube’s eld terrain, giving creators the ability to post videos up to 10 minutes long.
The novelty began to be available between late February and early March, obviously first gradually and then (predictably) extended to more and more accounts: “We are constantly thinking of new ways to bring value to our community and enrich the experience on TikTok – they told us from TikTok Italy – In 2021 we introduced videos longer, giving the community more time to create and enjoy. Today we are happy to be able to gradually make the possibility available to upload videos of up to 10 minutes, which we hope will further unleash the creativity of our creators around the world ”.
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Short and long, as long as they are videos
Why does this happen? Why did TikTok make this decision, beyond the circumstantial statements about creativity and fun? Mainly for two reasons. First of all, longer videos they increase the time people stay on the platform: making us stay there and continue scrolling, scrolling and scrolling, is the ultimate goal not only of TikTok, but of every social network. Indeed, of each site. The other reason is that longer duration videos should allow you to grab the attention of more mature users, for which perhaps the shorter contents are less immediate and more difficult to understand. Thus giving TikTok the opportunity to shake off the label of “social for kids”. And therefore to broaden the audience base.
In general, however, the videos (short or long, it doesn’t matter) are definitely both the fashion of the moment and the trend for the future: even Instagram, born as an app to share images, has introduced the Reels and is moving more and more towards movies. Which, as mentioned, increase the time people spend on the platforms. The same did Facebook (always with the Reels)while Snapchat created the Spotlight section.
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For TikTok there is an additional problem: if on the one hand, long videos cause people to use the app for longer, on the other hand they could complicate the collection of information about them, which are so much useful for the artificial intelligence algorithm that has proved so effective in figuring out what you like to who. It remains to be seen how the social network, controlled by the Chinese Bytedance, will be able to combine the two apparently conflicting needs.