• by Colin Kirkland , November 29, 2023

With a need to expand its advertising business, TikTok is now fully focused on the output of long-form videos.

A new report by The Information shows the company’s recent efforts to convince creators to put out longer videos in order to provide more room for ad placements.

According to the report, TikTok invited “dozens of creators” to its office in New York for a private event where executives told creators that by embracing longer videos on the historically short-form video app they will make more money and have more time to communicate their message.

“To drive that message home, TikTok told creators that users are now spending half their time on the app watching content that’s longer than a minute,” the report reads. “And over the past six months, creators who post videos longer than a minute have five times the growth rate in followers of those who post only short videos.”

Over the past several years, TikTok has experienced unprecedented growth across the globe, toting over 1 billion monthly active users as well as an unbeatable algorithm. Since its rise to prominence, TikTok has scared every other leading social media platform into developing their own short-form video features.

But now the app that made 15-second clips a global obsession is changing its tune as it attempts to generate advertising revenue.

“YouTube went out of its way to become more like TikTok, and now TikTok is trying to become more like YouTube,” Matt Koval, founder of consulting agency Creator Dynamics, who worked at YouTube for nearly a decade, told The Information.

YuTube creators are now able to earn revenue from ad share based on pre and mid-roll ads because of the longer average length of a YouTube video. On TikTok, videos are much shorter on average and therefore don’t provide creators with enough ad-time to profit.

One way TikTok has tried to accommodate longer-form videos is by ushering in a replacement monetization program for its Creator Fund, which is coming to a close next month. The new Creativity Program makes it mandatory for creators to upload videos longer than one minute in order to qualify and get paid.

The company said this new program will lead to payouts as much as 20 times higher than those stemming from the Creator Fund because of a reworked formula.

Overall, TikTok believes it must change user behavior on the app to not only compete with YouTube but to stay alive.