05/03/2024

Tick Tock: The Uncertain Future of Short-Form Video

Are we nearing the end of the great TikTokification?

When Vine was released in 2012, it felt like a truly new idea. The six second format birthed what seemed like an entirely new genre of comedy. The self-contained quotability of low-effort memes like road work ahead and look at all those chickens made them feel canned; timeless. Short form content has completely taken over the internet in the 10-ish years since, but that may be starting to change.

Vine caught the attention of both incumbent giants like Facebook, and startups like ByteDance (who make TikTok). What they all realised was that new mediums would be required to organise and present the exponentially growing amount of user-generated content being uploaded to their platforms and the internet more generally. As of 2022, over 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Over 100,000 songs are uploaded to music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music every day. Facebook has 300 million daily photo uploads; Instagram another 95 million. But this was not, of course, an exercise in record-keeping; it was an opportunity to optimise for the gold standard of social media metrics —engagement. The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, and short-form videos receive 2.5 times more engagement than long-form. We’re hooked: short-form video now accounts for nearly 90% of all consumer internet traffic.

So how did we get here? Vine failed in part because of a lack of monetisation model: it was unable to keep both creators and advertisers on board. Meta and TikTok have learnt from this, and the ad revenue sharing model they use has become the standard for social media companies. Naturally, money flowing means content flowing. Those early-adopter platforms —mainly TikTok— exploded with brands, influencers, and gurus looking for their share. In turn, other companies began to see the power of short form content for engaging both users and advertisers. Before long, everything was TikTok: YouTube Shorts; Spotify Clips; Amazon Inspire; even ultimate-guitar.com added Shots. What TikTok has established is now a recognisable design pattern that other platforms are happy to shoehorn their content into because it reduces their learning curve to near-zero. Once a user sees that familiar vertical layout with a progress bar along the bottom, they instinctively know that swiping up will probably fetch the next one. Similarly, the ‘like’ (or equivalent) button is probably on the right —just above the ‘comment’ button.

Inevitably, the incentives provided by The Algorithm have led to gamification. Using AI it’s now easier than ever to re-hash long-form content into short-form, and generate original video content by combining AI imagery and text-to-speech. So-called ‘sludge’ content has also emerged as a creative way of producing ultra-stimulating material. Stitching together a collage of totally unrelated clips: subway surfer; a family guy sketch; ‘satisfying’ sand-cutting, can capture a viewer’s full attention through a form of media multi-tasking. The addictiveness of this stuff demonstrates that engagement and quality are often at odds. The picture this situation paints is of companies mainlining an advert-spiked content cocktail directly into their customer’s eyeballs for hours at a time, then sitting back to rake in the proceeds. But this is uncharitable: this formula doesn’t work for platforms any more than it does for users.

Despite being the most engaging social media platform of all and having over a billion monthly active users, TikTok is still losing billions every year. Its creator fund has been criticised for its low payouts, so that’s not where the money’s going. The issue, as should be obvious to anyone who’s used TikTok, is that getting users to engage with adverts is very difficult. Given the choice to scroll past an advert, most people immediately do. The time advertisers have to hook people is a fraction of what it is elsewhere. Furthermore, part of the reason short form video platforms can be so toxic for users is that we forget what we’ve seen almost immediately. Even before accounting for the effects these platforms can have on our attention spans, our short-term memory is only 20-30 seconds in the first place, and is highly susceptible to interference. New information quickly displaces old. For advertisers, this means the chance a user will remember anything of their content after a session is very slim. Meta seem to be getting cold feet on the standard advertising model, and recently announced the end of their Facebook Reels Play bonus program for creators. Zuckerberg has previously questioned the profitability of short form video content, telling investors that “[the] monetisation efficiency of reels is much less than feed so … even though it adds to the engagement of the system overall it takes some time away from the feed and we actually lose money”.

Whilst platforms are trying to wrestle their massive engagement numbers into a viable commercial model, they’re not making a dent in the success of longer form content. The most popular podcast hosts are racking up millions of views on episodes three or four hours long. Despite the meme that ‘everyone’s got a podcast now’, there’s no sign of listeners or advertisers slowing down. Newsletter platform Substack now has 20 million active users, 2 million of which are paying customers. The trusty book —media gold as it were— hasn’t really wavered in popularity since about 2006, showing little change beyond a brief pandemic increase. At the same time, TikTok is struggling to maintain its user growth rates and it feels like they’re running out of road: there’s just nobody left to sign up.

It doesn’t seem improbable that as users begin to demand more from what they consume and platforms reckon with the fact that the short-form bet might not be paying off, the infinite video feed will leave as quickly as it arrived. TikTok is conscious of this, and in 2022 increased the maximum video length to 10 minutes, though some would argue that this runs counter to the central proposition of the platform. Their new Creator Rewards fund will calculate payouts based on an “optimized rewards formula” focusing on originality, play duration, search value, and audience engagement. Importantly, videos will need to be longer than a minute to be monetised. This is all before accounting for a potential US ban over concerns around data collection and Chinese government influence. However it pans out, we’re clearly still connecting the dots between creatives and their audiences through social media corporations and theirs —advertisers.