SOCIAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE
Business of Fashion
Business of Fashion
Time Might Be Ticking for TikTok & Shortform Media. Here’s What Creators Should Know.
Be honest. When was the last time you read a book? Or the last time you finished an entire news article in one sitting? If you’re pulling a blank, don’t worry—you’re just part of the vast majority who’ve reported drastically shortened attention spans since the pandemic began.
81% of students multitask while doing homework, while a close 76% of adults feel the need to check their inboxes even while watching TV. Think of how your typical scroll sesh has you jumping from Instagram to TikTok to Messages—and then back to Instagram all over again.
Well, this restlessness in the past few years is no coincidence. With the chokehold social media has on our lives, we’ll need to do a deeper dive into the ever-changing ecosystem of the Internet to see just how dramatically content creation has fluctuated since the vlogging days of the early 2010s. How are the tastemakers today riding the tides to stay afloat? The secret lies in the shifts between short and long-form content—one of the most crucial upcoming waves to pay attention to if creators don’t want to drown!
2019 - 2022: WHEN SHORT = SWEET
When apps like TikTok first blew up back in 2019 (with 693 million downloads that year alone, followed by another 850 million the pandemic year) no one batted an eye. Conceived in the shadow of its fallen predecessor, Musical.ly, TikTok just didn’t seem like anything special. The fall of Vine, though, would drastically change things—and unlike Musical.ly, TikTok would find itself in the right place at the right time to step up and “fill in the void” Vine’s shutdown opened up.
The first videos that blasted TikTok out of obscurity were arguably its dance trends: 15-second clips of eye-catching choreography catered to a 9:16 frame. What these dances hit, though, was precisely the golden nugget that made TikTok so appealing to the average viewer—the ability to mimic, recreate, and go viral.
Think back to the Youtube glory days, when Internet personalities like Jenna Marbles, PewDiePie, and NigaHiga (followed by Emma Chamberlain, David Dobrik, and Mr. Beast for the younger crowd) had teens everywhere picking up cameras to record skits and vlogs of their own. The vlogging craze was so influential, a survey in 2019 showed that ⅓ of kids saw “Youtuber” as their dream career—leaving the quintessential astronauts, firefighters, and movie stars as an afterthought. What TikTok did was make this pipe dream a whole lot more accessible—all it takes to hit it big is a phone, the app, and yourself.
Most notably? TikTok was a platform that rewarded content over a loyal fanbase. Unlike YouTube or Instagram, where your follower and subscriber counts determined just how much weight your content carried in the algorithm, TikTok seemed to dissolve metric boundaries and somewhat level the playing field. The platform is built around its audio function, with a sound library growing exponentially day by day, chock full of quotable clips, earworms of songs, and edited remixes of all of the above. A simple search of “TikTok sounds” on Google lands you in a minefield of updating articles, each promising the latest sounds “guaranteed to make your video go viral.”
Viewers who stumble across a video they like—a choreography, funny lip-syncing trends, thirst traps, and so on—need simply click on the sound to try making their own versions, which appear alongside others that have amassed millions of views. Trending sounds are to TikTok what the Instagram hashtag game was in 2015. Never has that sought-after 15-minutes of fame seemed so within reach.
What TikTok’s design really hit on the head was Gen Z’s affinity for meme culture. The sounds options laid out endless potential pathways for recreations upon recreations of the same joke, skit, or trend. The “Stitch” option, too, took YouTube’s popular “reaction video” format and repackaged it with infinitely lower production demands. Stitches have since evolved from reactions to entire collaborative jokes—see Marcus DiPaola’s girlfriend-reveal-turned-hostage-situation, where over 10 accounts formed a mosaic of a “hostage” skit from the original creator’s video, which had seemed comically tense.
This growing playground for creativity is precisely why Dmitry Shapiro, CEO and Co-Founder of GoMeta, believes “remixing is the future of creation” for social media. Blending familiarity with innovation inspires users to jump on the trend train while putting in their own two cents. The result? Layers upon layers of context and self-expression, stemming right from the hands of its user base.
Memes are the nucleus of Gen Z humour and attitudes—so it goes without saying that brands that understand this best have the best bet of thriving in the ecosystem for years to come. Still, if the recent extensions of TikTok video length are any indicator, it looks like the restless generation is already looking for its next creative outlet—and short form just doesn’t cut it anymore.
TICK, TOCK: A TIME BOMB SET INTO MOTION?
Sure enough, the first flames of TikTok’s long standing controversies were sparked from none other than the dances that popularised the platform in the first place.
Most of us remember when the “Renegade” choreo became synonymous with hot COVID summer: created by Jalailah Harmon, a Black teen from Atlanta, the routine was eagerly swept up by creators huge and small—as Jalailah was cast into the shadows of other creators like the D’Amelio sisters and Addison Rae. In a media ecosystem where anyone can go viral, this begs the question: how do we give credit where credit is due? And in an ocean of white creators, who’s really deciding what content gets pushed to the top?
As Megan McCluskey for Time recalls, TikTok has a past of explicitly detailing their suppression of physically disabled, LGBTQ, and overweight users as a part of their “anti-bullying” policies. This—understandably—raised an uproar of backlash as BIPOC creators wondered what content the algorithm was really trained to support or shadowban. As it turns out, this influx of the self-made and accidentally viral is proving to be a double-edged sword.
See, for the first time ever in history, the lines between mainstream and marginalised are being blurred. What short-form content has brought—seeds sown by Vine, and cultivated by TikTok—is ultimately a decentralisation of influencer culture, and who holds the power in the media industry. Every subculture has its own spotlight—and with increasingly smart algorithms that cultivate your very own “echo chamber” of entertainment. It’s as easy as 1, 2, scroll.
As a platform whose success is largely owed to BIPOC creators—from trends to aesthetics, music, dances, and so on—appropriation runs rampant, leaving the OGs at a loss. “Whether it’s Latino or Asian or whatever you are, I feel like it’s way harder to go up on TikTok if you are not white,” Noah Webster tells NBC.
Since its steady rise in 2019, TikTok has certainly proven itself a force to be reckoned with. It’s an app that places power in the hands of its people—a group as impressionable as they are talented—and has mobilised as many social movements as it has suppressed. An ecosystem where information and entertainment are competing for attention all the time, us consumers find ourselves at the midst of a paradox. Our knowledge has unprecedented scope, but the depth has never been so shallow. TL;DR, we know a little about a lot.
So there you have it. Short-form content has capitalised off of Gen Z’s restless energy for the longest time (the past five years, which is practically Internet history). Whether it’s daily attention-grabs like BeReal, or apps slowly growing analogous with each other (think IG Reels, TikTok Nows, and Twitter Stories), platforms are competing for what little attention we have left. But short-form’s shelf life is just about up—and trend forecasters like Coco Mocoe are placing their bets on long-form making an explosive comeback.
SHORT VIDEO FATIGUE & LONG-TERM MIGRATION
Even with its growing plethora of problems, TikTok’s presence in the social media ecosystem is cemented in Internet history—at least, as cemented as you can be in a market with short-term memory. Still, this oversaturation of short-form creators is steadily approaching a breaking point–and leading us straight into what Mocoe coins “short video fatigue.” Whether it’s a self-awareness of the “doom-scroll” and overstimulation we’ve been numbing our brains with, or simply another inevitable shift in consumer attention, expect to see a gradual transition back to long form content and their corresponding platforms.
Think back to when TikTok began extending its video length to 3 minutes, then 10. Movie points out the current gap on Youtube’s platform since the “modern day gold rush” when TikTok sent users flocking for their slice of fame. Yet as longer video essays, get-ready-with-mes, and vlogs experience a resurgence in popularity, this genre of content will only get more coveted as the market shifts in long form’s favour. In other words, TikTok’s 10-minute feature may well have opened the gateway to YouTube’s revival—and since so many YouTubers had to make the cross-platform leap to TikTok years ago, retracing their steps to bridge the gap shouldn’t be nearly as difficult.
And let’s face it—the reputation YouTube builds, Mocoe points out, already sets them apart from short-form platforms like TikTok. While the latter may be known for propelling the unsuspecting into stardom, the slow and steady growth YouTube demands from its creators tends to build stronger brand loyalty (and favour with sponsors) in the long run.
If brands and creators want to be ahead of the curve, it’s becoming all the more important to place your eggs in multiple baskets. What makes this shift different from the last decade is the lack of distinguishment between YouTubers, Instagram influencers, TikTokers, and so on. Platforms no longer delineate creator types so much as they showcase another aspect of your brand image.
So watch for the next wave incoming in the creator ecosystem and invest in long-form projects! When Gen Z begins migrating platforms en masse, be a part of the successful creators that’re already prepared to meet them halfway.
Written December 2022
SOURCES
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2020/01/31/tiktok-why-the-enormous-success/? sh=750deede65d1
https://www.insider.com/a-timeline-of-allegations-that-tiktok-censored-black-creators-2 021-7
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/months-after-tiktok-apologize d-black-creators-many-say-little-has-n1256726
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1011899328/black-tiktok-creators-are-on-strike-to-protes t-a-lack-of-credit-for-their-work
https://time.com/5863350/tiktok-black-creators/