Social media giant TikTok has made a show of force against YouTube, announcing a new 10-minute maximum video length for posts on the platform.
Just eight months after extending its video length from 60 seconds to three minutes, TikTok has made a huge statement by increasing it yet again to 10 minutes as it hopes to topple YouTube in the social media video market. TikTok was cited by Cloudflare as the most popularly used website in 2021, overtaking Google – owner of YouTube – itself.
“Last year, we introduced longer videos, giving our community more time to create and be entertained on TikTok. Today, we’re excited to start rolling out the ability to upload videos that are up to 10 minutes, which we hope would unleash even more creative possibilities for our creators around the world.”
TikTok representative
TikTok already has an aggressive stranglehold on attention spans, with the app logging over 1 billion active monthly users, and by increasing the video length to 10 minutes, it could be infiltrating territory previously seen as monopolized by YouTube
YouTube put the gauntlet down last year on TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, introducing YouTube Shorts. Shorts was designed as a direct challenge to TikTok, with the service being for videos under 60 seconds. This is in addition to Instagram’s riff on TikTok content, dubbed as ‘Reels’.
The move will undoubtedly cause another shift in TikTok’s potential audiences, with longer length allowing for a more diverse range of content, such as entertainment reviews, and gaming content.
