According to a new post from Matt Navarra, the founder of Geekout Newsletter, on Threads, TikTok is incentivizing creators to post horizontal/landscape videos (videos with width greater than height) that are more than a minute in length (via The Verge). According to the screenshots he shared, the video streaming platform is notifying creators that if they post videos that meet the two conditions, it will boost those videos for increased views within 72 hours of posting.
Of course, the incentive comes with a few conditions, including that the video should be original content, shouldn’t be an advertisement, government, or political video, and that the creator should have been on TikTok for at least three months.
TikTok started as a platform for vertical short-length videos, and that’s how it became popular, and that’s what it is known for at the moment. YouTube, on the other hand, is known for having horizontal long-length videos. However, last year, TikTok increased the maximum length of videos to 15 minutes, and earlier this year, it started testing the maximum length of videos up to 30 minutes. Now, TikTok is incentivizing horizontal videos as well.
These steps from TikTok suggest that it wants to increase the number of horizontal long-length videos on the platform to become more like YouTube. Maybe, TikTok wants to grab some of YouTube’s audience. While TikTok may be able to grab a few of YouTube’s users, it might not be able to make a huge dent in YouTube’s viewership as TikTok isn’t available in the world’s most populated country, India, and creators on YouTube might not want to shift to TikTok as it would be a huge, risky, and unnecessary task for them.
