Popular social media platform, TikTok is notably one of the most used apps globally – serving users with short-form video content from creators of several genres.
The platform which is owned by the Chinese-based company, ByteDance Ltd boasts millions of creators churning out straight-to-the-point videos without the need for a long storyline.
With many active users on the platform, TikTok has been labelled a top competitor for other social media platforms that eventually updated their services to include straight-to-the-point videos – platforms like Meta’s Instagram and Facebook (Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels, respectively) as well as Google’s YouTube (YouTube Shorts) and Snapchat (Snapchat Spotlight).
However, a recent update from ByteDance Ltd reveals that TikTok’s newest update will now accommodate the creation of longer videos of up to ten minutes long.
Over the years, users have watched TikTok’s creation length for videos evolve and this is just another evolution of the widely used social media platform. Initially, TikTok, upon launch, started out with a 15-seconds limit for creators. It was then extended to 60-seconds and then 3 minutes. And with this new update, creators can now make videos for up to ten minutes long.
While it may seem that the company is gradually shifting from its original short-form regulation, the company had disclosed that this update is coming in handy to build a better user experience for creators to unleash their “full potential.”
However, this announcement still positions the social media platform as one of the strong competitors for YouTube and Instagram. The two platforms with arguably an equal amount of user database, have been battling for dominance in the creator space and evidently, this update may force other platforms to react with the rolling of similar updates (or better).
A few creators have also suspected that this update may come with a policy that allows ads on TikTok. While this may be true, the possibility of that happening wasn’t disclosed by the company. However, they have disclosed that the feature update is said to be rolled out in the coming weeks ahead – we can only wait and look out for TikTok updates on the various mobile application stores.
