The average TikTok user — including one billion worldwide, more than 100 million in the US, and 23 million in the UK — spends an hour and 25 minutes on the app every day, according to data shared by TikTok in a call. privately presented to corporate customers by the end of January 2022. The average TikTok user opens the app to watch videos 17 times a day.
Gahan said longer videos will likely further increase TikTok’s market share. First, it will compete with YouTube’s longer videos, which have a large share of the content on the site. “Longer form content gives TikTok more direct reach on YouTube,” he said. “Since YouTube is the second largest search engine, even capturing a small fraction of their viewership can make a huge positive divide.”
Meg Jing Zeng, a TikTok researcher at the University of Zurich, said the decision was mainly due to the potential to increase ad revenue. “The increase in traffic itself is more profitable, but the longer videos themselves can be more profitable,” she says. “For example, it allows TikTok to work with institutional partners, including commercial institutional partners, to produce content with product placement.” While the company does not share its advertising income, reports from China claim the company earn 4 billion dollars on ad revenue in 2021.
Additionally, longer videos could help extend the life of TikTok’s user base, who are more used to YouTube-length videos than those that are 15 or 60 seconds long. “For mature TikTokers who are used to watching longer content on YouTube and less interested in taking on dance challenges or re-creating memes, long videos could be the right product,” says Zeng. to keep them entertained. In the UK, 56% of TikTok users are still between the ages of 16 and 24, according to internal TikTok 2022 data obtained by WIRED, although that proportion has decreased over time.
However, extending the video length comes with many risks. It sacrifices a key factor that has set TikTok apart from competing apps: Its algorithmic advantage. By sharing users with shorter, different videos, TikTok is able to glean more insights into user preferences than shorter, shorter videos. “You get more data on how people engage with more content,” says Hank Green, a veteran content creator and founder of VidCon. “That allows the algorithm to make better decisions.” 3-minute videos, if watched to the end, provide 12 times less data than 15-second videos on TikTok, Green pointed out. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, may have considered that calculation, and may believe that its algorithm has been trained well enough on user behavior so far to not need a lot of constant data to provide. for it.
Extending the video length also eliminates the opportunity to serve ads between shorter videos — a risk to the app’s monetization goals. “I don’t even know how mid-roll ads will work on TikTok,” Green said. “Honestly, I think a user would be pretty angry about that one.”
While some users may not like longer videos, Marion Thain at King’s College London, whose research shows half of us think our attention span is shorter than it actually is, don’t think they will be a deal breaker. “Our study shows that people certainly feel stressed by the distractions of new technologies, but perhaps more surprisingly, it also revealed that a significant proportion think Multi-tasking can improve their lives.
