Videos now up to 3 minutes long: Will TikTok become YouTube's competitor?

[17:40 wed,7.July 2021 by Thomas Richter]

Until now, a maximum of 60-second videos could be uploaded to the video portal TikTok, which is particularly popular with young people; longer videos were only possible in the form of several video series linking to one another. In the coming weeks, TikTok wants to gradually give more and more users the opportunity to post longer videos. Videos up to 3 minutes long can then be filmed, uploaded and edited in TikTok. Users will be notified as soon as the new option is enabled for them.

Since TikTok, similar to other apps (or even YouTube), wants to maximize the time users spend with its app, longer videos are an easy way to achieve this. YouTube has been on this path for a long time, rewarding creators of longer videos with better placement by the algorithm that suggests videos to users and is responsible for a large portion of the time spent by users on YouTube.

If TikTok continues to follow this path - TikTok even started with a limitation of 15 second clips, but this was soon extended to 60 seconds - the first Chinese social media service to be used globally could become even more of a competitor to YouTube than it already is.

While the content of TikTok initially consisted mostly of the typical karaoke and playback singing videos, so-called TikToks, cooking and beauty tutorials are now also increasingly being posted, which are difficult to fit into the 1-minute corset and can also be found in a similar way on YouTube. After all, the success of TikTok, especially with the valuable young audience, has worried the competition YouTube and Facebok enough to launch similar formats in the form of YouTube shorts or, soon, short videos on Instagram.

TikTok started out as the successor to the music video portal musical.ly and adopted its special form of video creation: at the beginning of a newly recorded video on a smartphone, the user selects a popular music track from TikTok&s large sound library, to which the user then produces his or her own recording with matching vocals, dance or acting. This can then be modified using numerous special effects, augmented reality effects and filters. Through reactions to other videos and video quotes, this has become a lively video-based social network for the younger generation.

more infos at bei newsroom.tiktok.com

deutsche Version dieser Seite: Videos jetzt bis zu 3 Minuten lang: Wird TikTok zur YouTube Konkurrenz?