- Tubular Labs report shows long-form videos over 5 minutes.
- TikTok’s Creator Rewards program incentivizes longer content.
- The viral series “Who TF Did I Marry?” exemplifies long-form success on the platform.
A recent report by Tubular Labs reveals that long-form videos, specifically those over 5 minutes in length, from the top four US broadcast, cable, and radio publishers garnered the highest average views on TikTok in 2023.
This finding suggests that the platform has been prioritizing longer videos over shorter ones for media and entertainment accounts. TikTok has gradually increased its maximum video length over the years, from 15 seconds at launch to 10 minutes in early 2022.
Creator rewards program fuels longer content
In February 2023, TikTok launched the Creator Rewards program, which compensates users for views received on videos longer than one minute.
This initiative, previously known as Creativity Program Beta, became accessible to all creators in March 2024. The program has proven lucrative for many creators, some earning tens of thousands of dollars per month.
The introduction of this program has encouraged creators to post longer videos, and viewers have responded positively, spending 50% of their time watching content over a minute in length.
Case study: “Who TF Did I Marry?”
A prime example of the success of long-form content on TikTok is the recent viral 68-part series “Who TF Did I Marry?” by ReesaTeesa. According to the Tubular Labs report, the average video length in the series was 8 minutes, totaling 546 minutes.
Each video garnered an average of 1.2 million views and 105,000 engagements. Interestingly, the engagement for the hashtag #whotfdidimarry was 2.2% higher than ReesaTeesa’s engagement, indicating that audiences were even more engaged with the conversation surrounding the series than with the creator’s own channel.
The report also found that media and entertainment publishers increased their presence on TikTok, posting 57% more videos in 2023, resulting in a 53% increase in views. YouTube, a long-standing favorite among media publishers due to its landscape format and adaptability from TV, saw a 5% increase in uploads in 2023 compared to the previous year.
Still, views grew organically by 118%, from 59 billion in January 2023 to 129 billion in December 2023. As John Castillo, an analyst at media analytics group TVREV, notes, “Traditional media and entertainment companies utilize social video as a key promotional tool, and during last year’s entertainment work stoppages, many leaned into archive content to keep engaging with viewers.
For digital-native media companies, these hurdles also became an opportunity to fill programming voids for audiences with both long- and short-form content.”
