Want more money from TikTok? Post longer videos

TikTok has built an empire off of short-form videos. Most of the videos on the platform are under a minute, but it seems that the company wants to make a change. TikTok has a new monetization program that will incentivize longer videos.

TikTok’s dominance caused other media companies to change their strategies. This even caused YouTube, the king of long-form video content, to invest in short videos. This seems to be where the video-making market is headed towards.

TikTok wants you to make longer videos

While TikTok’s claim to fame is the repopularization of short-form videos (hey, let’s not forget about Vine!), the ByteDance-owned app wants its users to post longer videos, apparently. According to an announcement from the company (via 9To5Mac), TikTok has introduced a new monetization platform.

The program will grant users more money depending on when they post higher-quality content. The guidelines also state that the videos must be more than a minute long in order to be eligible.

This is definitely out of left field, as a ton of TikToks are tiny slices of life. They’re quick jokes, rants, little lip-syncs, dances, etc. A lot of what people post to TikTok can be summed up in less than 60 seconds. We can make jokes about short attention spans, but a lot of the time, people do want their content in bite-sized chunks.

In any case, with more money dangling on a string, you can bet that full-time TikTokers will be posting longer content to the platform. Remember, TikTok allows you to post videos as long as 10 minutes. While a 10-minute TikTok sounds absurd, more time can’t hurt.

This could be a move against YouTube

As stated before, TikTok was able to make companies like YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and even Twitter bend to the vertical scrolling video hype. In the early days of TikTok, things were pretty binary: you had YouTube for your longer videos and TikTok for your shorter videos; the world was in harmony.

Then, things changed when TikTok started eating into YouTube’s user base. This is when the massive video-sharing platform brought about Shorts.

Now, it seems that TikTok wants to encourage people to schlep their long-form video endeavors over to TikTok. For all we know, this could cause people to consider TikTok as an alternative to YouTube. Only time will tell.