TikTok: From now on up to ten minutes long videos possible

TikTok is increasing the maximum video length on its platform to ten minutes. This step is likely to be motivated primarily by the resulting expansion of advertising opportunities.

Test phase completed

When the Chinese app TikTok, which is particularly popular among children and young people, was launched in 2016, videos were allowed to be a maximum of fifteen seconds long. This enormous brevity of posts was the main thing that set the app apart from the competition: users had to condense their posts to the most essential, which led to new forms of storytelling and a general change in the culture of media expression online. Over time, however, the Chinese company kept increasing the maximum permitted video length – first to one, then to three minutes. In a test phase, five-minute videos were recently possible.

With the announcement that it will allow videos of up to ten minutes in length with immediate effect, the company is thus consistently following the route it has decided to take. However, this also means moving closer to competitors such as YouTube and increasingly abandoning the app’s unique selling point.

More advertising opportunities

However, the expansion of video length should be attractive to TikTok. The longer a video is, the more opportunities there are for the company to monetize it. The portal onlinemarketing.de noted, for example, that mid-roll ads and similar advertising solutions could now be used in the longer videos, which would mean another source of revenue for TikTok.

In addition, the expansion of video length – provided it is well received by users – is likely to increase the length of time spent on the platform. This in turn means that the advertising share should increase in purely quantitative terms: The longer someone stays on TikTok, the more different ads she or he can be shown.

Other ways of expression

Beyond these purely economic considerations, the expansion of video length is likely to lead to changes in the forms of storytelling on the platform. If users now have significantly more time for their narratives, maximum compression, which was previously less a stylistic device than a technical necessity, no longer seems necessary and could be replaced by more conventional forms of storytelling. From the perspective of media science and narrative theory, it is therefore exciting to observe the effects of changes in the medium on narrative forms, stylistic devices, and goals of representation.