The average TikTok user — of which there are a billion worldwide, more than 100 million in the United States 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 private app. presentation to business customers at the end of January 2022. The average TikTok user opens the app to watch videos 17 times a day.
Longer videos are likely to further increase TikTok’s market share, says Gahan. First, it will compete with YouTube’s longer videos, which make up the bulk of the content on the site. “With content in a longer form, TikTok can take over YouTube more directly,” he says. “Since YouTube is the second largest search engine, capturing even a fraction of their viewers can have a huge positive impact on TikTok.”
The decision is largely driven by the potential for more ad revenue, thinks Meg Jing Zeng, a TikTok researcher at the University of Zurich. “The increase in traffic itself brings more profit, but longer videos themselves can be more lucrative,” she says. “For example, it allows TikTok to collaborate with institutional partners, including commercial institutional partners, to produce content with product placement.” While the company does not share its ad revenue, reports from China claim the company will have earned $4 billion in ad revenue by 2021.
In addition, longer videos can age TikTok’s user base, which is more accustomed to YouTube videos rather than videos that are wrapped in 15 or 60 seconds. “For mature TikTokers, who are more used to watching longer content on YouTube and less interested in participating in dance challenges or recreating memes, long videos can be appropriate products to entertain them,” says Zeng. In the UK, 56 percent of TikTok users are still between the ages of 16 and 24, according to internal TikTok data from 2022 obtained by WIRED, although that share has declined over time.
However, extending the video length carries a number of risks. It sacrifices one key factor that allowed TikTok to differentiate itself from competing apps: its algorithmic advantage. By overloading users with several, shorter videos, TikTok can gain more insight into a user’s interest than fewer, longer ones. “You get more data on how people interact with more content,” said Hank Green, an accomplished content creator and founder of VidCon. “This allows the algorithm to make better decisions.” Three-minute videos, when viewed in full, provide 12 times less data than 15-second videos on TikTok, Green points out. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, may have considered that calculation and might think that the algorithm is already well-trained in user behavior to not need so much data.
Extending the video length also removes the ability to show ads between shorter videos, posing a risk to the app’s monetization goals. “I don’t even know how a mid-roll ad on TikTok would work,” says Green. “I think a user would be quite angry to be honest.”
While some users may not like longer videos, Marion Thain of King’s College London, whose research has found that half of us think our attention spans are shorter than they actually are, doesn’t think they’ll be a deal breaker. “Our research shows that people are certainly stressed out by the distractions of new technologies, but, perhaps more surprisingly, it also reveals that a significant proportion believe multitasking can improve their lives,” she says.
