Good afternoon - Tiktok has increased their max video length to ten mintues.

Yes, that's right, ten whole minutes - over triple the previous limit of three mintues. The app seems to slowly be saying goodbye to the concept of being a short-form video content platform, which is an interesting choice, as it got much of its audience due to its similarity to the now-defunct app Vine, which famously capped videos at six seconds.

The move is apparently a bid to appeal to advertisers, as right now many more traditional advertisers don't feel comfortable trying to navigate this new territory - studies of its userbase have shown that the average user quite literally does not have the attention span for anything much longer than a minute. The push to put longer content in the app isn't necessarily to challenge those users, but to attract new ones who will watch longer videos and bring the app's overall average watch time up.

As exciting as this is for advertisers and TikTok higher-ups, it poses a few potential problems for regular users of the app. First of all, placing a ten minute video in the middle of the "endless scroll" style feed that users are used to could upset the entire experience of flipping through tiktok - people will never know whether they're about to get hooked into a long video, something they may not be ready to do if they only opened the app to pass a minute or two of time.

In addition, this method would also present a much larger problem, as it would throw a wrench into the works of the secret sauce that makes TikTok work: It's finely tuned viewership algorithms. The more videos someone on the app watches or skips, the more data that it can collect on what that person likes or does not like. This, in turn, allows it to serve better and more specifically targeted content to each individual.

But the longer you make your videos, the less of that data you'll be able to gather. Increasing the limit from one minute to three already means three times less data every time someone gets hooked into a longer video; ten mintues will be another story entirely.

Simply adding the longer videos directly to the app's main feed - the For You Page - isn't the only option, though. As social media analyst Matt Navarra told The Verge, there are other options they could (and should) consider:

"They could do with a dedicated home for longer-form content as [it] doesn't sit so well in the vertical feed with shorter stuff people are used to whizzing through at speed."

For example, when you open the app, instead of being able to flip between the "For You" tab and the "Following" tab, you may be able to scroll through to a third tab that houses longer videos.

It's unclear if this move will actually help TikTok begin to better monetize, but one thing is for sure: All these social media apps are beginning to get a little homogeneous. As TikTok pushes for longer content, apps like Instagram, Facebook, and even YouTube are pushing shorter, bite-sized reels. The future of video content is a little all over the place at the moment - this TikTok experiment may become part of a larger litmus test for where it can and cannot go.