Why Long-Form TikTok Videos Make Perfect Sense
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After YouTube found success in taking from TikTok’s short-form playbook, TikTok is returning the favor with increasing the app’s video limit to a full 60 minutes as the battle for users’ attention heats up.
TikTok’s push to long-form social video may be surprising, considering that its vertical short-form video model has since been copied by most social media platforms, from Instagram to YouTube to even LinkedIn. But despite the crowded field and a U.S. ban possibly on the horizon, TikTok still handedly commands user attention.
In January 2023, eMarketer found that TikTok passed YouTube in daily average social video time spent by users in 2022, hitting 52 minutes to YouTube’s 46. By December, it predicted TikTokers would average 55 minutes of daily time spent on the app — about 5 minutes higher than YouTube users and even encroaching on Netflix’s average.
Still, YouTube Shorts has proven to be a worthy adversary to TikTok less than four years since its launch. In 2023 alone, Shorts users crossed the 2 billion mark and accumulated upward of 50 billion views a day. This upward trajectory is even more notable given that TikTok’s user growth had slowed dramatically by the end of 2023.
In an ironic twist, YouTube may now be the blueprint for TikTok’s redemption, as the latter undoubtedly dominates short-form video. Plus, historically, if content creators wanted to make a long-form video, they’d post an excerpt on TikTok to divert viewers to a video platform that supports longer videos — which is almost always YouTube.
That’s a good amount of engagement time TikTok is missing out on due to the limitations of short-form video, especially considering there is indeed a large and passionate audience for long-form online content. A recent eMarketer survey among Gen Z users found that while consumption of short videos is the most common social media activity, over 50% of respondents also enjoy longer videos.
The above data also happened to come out around the same time YouTuber Jenny Nicholson’s four-hour video on the shuttered Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel went viral and introduced the greater public to the world of multihour YouTube video essays. While these videos tend to be on incredibly niche topics, as demonstrated by Nicholson those done well manage to hold millions of viewers rapt despite their movie-length runtimes.
For TikTok, the ability to platform both short- and long-form videos — and keep users in the app instead of jumping elsewhere — is obviously an appealing strategy as it looks to jumpstart growth. Of course, doing so puts it in even more direct competition with YouTube, whose creators are producing potentially Emmy-worthy videos that bring in viewership on par with Disney and Netflix.
Regardless of YouTube’s larger user base and decade-plus head start, TikTok currently leads in minutes watched per user. That’s a fact YouTube should consider as a very real threat to its unchallenged reign in the long-form social video world.
