![]() ![]() While some users may dislike longer videos, Marion Thain at King’s College London, whose research found that half of us think our attention span is shorter than it actually is, doesn’t think they will be a deal breaker. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, may well have taken that calculation into consideration, and could believe its algorithm is already well-trained enough on user behavior by now to not need as much data constantly feeding it. “That enables the algorithm to make better decisions.” Three-minute videos, if watched to completion, offer 12 times less data than 15-second videos on TikTok, Green points out. “You get more pieces of data on how people are interacting with more pieces of content,” says Hank Green, a veteran content creator and founder of VidCon. By peppering users with different, shorter videos, TikTok can gain more insights about a user’s interest than fewer, longer ones. It sacrifices one key factor that has allowed TikTok to differentiate itself from competitive apps: Its algorithmic advantage. Yet extending video length comes with plenty of risks. In the UK, 56 percent of TikTok users are still aged 16 to 24, according to internal 2022 TikTok data obtained by WIRED, though that proportion has decreased over time. “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 could be suitable products to keep them entertained,” says Zeng. “For instance, it allows TikTok to work with institutional partners, including commercial institutional partners, to produce content with product placement.” While the company doesn’t share its advertising income, reports out of China claim the company earned $4 billion in ad revenue in 2021.īeyond that, longer videos could help age up TikTok’s user base, who are more accustomed to YouTube-length videos, rather than ones wrapped up within 15 or 60 seconds. “The increase in traffic itself brings more profit, but longer videos themselves can be more lucrative,” she says. The decision is largely driven by the potential for more advertising revenue, reckons Meg Jing Zeng, a TikTok researcher at the University of Zurich. “Given YouTube is the second largest search engine, even capturing a fraction of their viewership could have massive positive ramifications for TikTok.” “Longer form content allows TikTok to more directly take on YouTube,” he says. For one, it will compete with YouTube’s longer videos, which make up the lion’s share of content on the site. Longer videos will likely further increase TikTok’s market share, says Gahan. The average TikTok user opens the app to watch videos 17 times a day. The average TikTok user-of which there are one 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 an private presentation to business clients in late January 2022. ![]() ![]() “It’s not because I don’t have time,” he said, “but because I can’t concentrate. And to hammer home the point, TikTok quoted a speed-watching laborer in his 20s in its slide deck. The app overindexed among social media users compared to other large platforms for having just the right length of videos, TikTok data showed. Nearly 50 percent of users surveyed by TikTok said videos longer than a minute long were stressful a third of users watched videos online at double speed. TikTok representatives presented internal survey data, seen by WIRED, which they claimed showed that social media users are “flooded with large amounts of video content.” People’s ability to concentrate was being hit. A slide deck shown to Japanese advertisers claimed that TikTok users have such difficulty concentrating that the sites' snappy 60-second videos made it better at engaging them than any other social media platform. In June 2021, TikTok executives admitted that the site's users have very poor attention spans. ![]()
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