Meta announced a month ago it would stop paying bonuses to creators for making Reels. The program, originally introduced in 2021, incentivized content makers to generate more short videos.
People are staying longer on the platform watching Reels, so what is the problem?
Shorts are far less profitable and hard to monetize.
Even Mark Zuckerberg confessed during the Meta Q4 2022 conference call: “The more that Reels grows, even though it adds engagement to the system overall, it takes some time away from Feed and we actually lose money. But people want to see more Reels.”
So it seems short-form content on Meta is mainly stealing market share not from TikTok but… from themselves.
People switching to Reels cost 500M to Meta company just for Q3 2022 according to Zuckerberg himself. 💸
TikTok is increasing its max video length
On the other hand TikTok is at the same time aggressively trying to increase its max video length (from 15 seconds to 30s, then 60s, 3min, to a 10min test recently). The company even experienced a landscape mode on Android. ⏲
Moreover long-form content is experiencing a renaissance. The global podcasting market size was estimated at USD 4 billion in 2020 and has risen to 19 billion in 2022. It is even expected to reach USD 23.75 billion in 2023. The average length of “normal” videos on YouTube is also increasing.
YouTube and Instagram seem to slowly realize they might have invested too much on a low ROI fad and TikTok is fighting hard not to become the next Vine. It seems that this is not the end of the creation of long content but on the contrary the beginning of a new bullish cycle!
And if you are a fan of long-form videos like me, Favoree is the perfect tool to discover new quality and in-depth content from YouTube.
