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.