Poll: Can TikTok truly challenge YouTube in the long video segment?

Last month TikTok decided to step on YouTube’s toes and expand the length of its videos to 10 minutes. It’s also not the first time TikTok has adjusted the maximum length of the videos on the platform. Just one year ago, the limit was 1 minute, then it got expanded to 3 minutes, and now we have this new 10-minute limit.

The number is not a coincidence, either. According to a 2018 study by Statista, the average length of a YouTube video is 11.7 minutes. Best practices and Google’s own recommendations place the average length of videos between 8 and 15 minutes, with 10 minutes being the golden medium.

So, clearly TikTok is aiming to take a bite out of that sweet YouTube fanbase, and as a result - revenue. Can it succeed, though? Let’s look at some numbers. As of January 2020, TikTok has more than 1 billion active users, while YouTube doubles that number to score more than 2 billion active users in 2022.

If we look at the revenue, YouTube generated a whopping $19.2 billion last year, while TikTok trails behind with “only” $2.3 billion in user spending. So, it’s clear then? No competition? Things aren’t that simple - TikTok is one of the fastest growing social media in the past couple of years, and looking at the demographics, the future belongs to the young.