While TikTok is completely aware that longer 60 seconds videos stress out users. That won’t stop them from chasing the lucrative long-video sector.
In June 2021 a few of TikTok’s executives mentioned that the platform users have moderately poor attention spans. TikTok claims that users have had such difficulty in engaging and concentrating that the platforms newly presented 60 second video resulted in better engagement overall. The results showed that the engagement was better than on any other platform.
TikTok representatives presented survey data that was previously conducted, which showed that social media users receive clusters of large amounts of video content that resulted in lower ability to concentrate and engage. Nearly 50% of users surveyed by TikTok said that video longer than a minute was stressful and that a third of its users watch videos online at double speed.
Later, TikTok’s product manager has announced TikTok will prolong their maximum video length from one to three minutes. Ever since TikTok has started testing the length of videos on their platform. Between August 2021 and February 2022, the platform tested 5-minute-long videos and even 10-minute-long videos, but only among small group of beta testers.
This approach is an opposite step from what the data, surveys conducted show. The bet TikTok is taking is that the users don’t know best. Their rationale is “Short videos can only get the app so far.” While we all know TikTok has ridden the wave of popularity for some time now, TikTok needs to diversify to sustainably grow its revenue, it needs longer videos, that will ultimately gain more attention. Thus, the benefit being able to capitalise on the platform even more because there is space for more advertising than ever.
This is an interesting approach we are seeing from TikTok. When we compare other platforms like Instagram are chasing shorter videos by launching Reels. But also, other platforms like Snapchat that launched Spotlight, and YouTube with their Shorts.You can see these trends happening because TikTok’s influence is large enough to force change among other social media platforms.
