The obsession of every social media is to expand the number of members and lengthen the time everyone spends on the platform. In order to succeed in this, work is continuous and includes the launch of new features capable of attracting both old and new users. However, what attracts the latter’s attention is the content created by the creators.
To grab the best on the market, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are competing for new features with the aim of providing creators with more opportunities to monetise from their activity. The latest arrival in this respect is Series, just announced by TikTok. It presents itself as a tool unlike any other and is destined to mark a turning point for digital platforms and those who work and earn money through social media.
What are Series, and how they work
Launched in the European and US markets, TikTok Series is a video collage that allows creators to group together clips dedicated to a theme. Unlike the similar Collections already available, followers will have to pay to view the content. This is where the difference with the past lies, as it will be up to the creator to set the price of each Series, which can comprise up to 80 videos, with each clip lasting up to 20 minutes.
This is a considerable leap forward for TikTok, which hopes to boost the earnings of creators, who are asked to vary the cost of the Series (from $1 to $190) to entice fans to buy the content. The Series can be accessed via the link in other clips of the creator or via the creator’s own home page.
Premium content, TikTok as OnlyFans
Another relevant detail is that in the first phase of the launch, all proceeds will end up in the pockets of the creators, while the idea of the social app owned by ByteDance is to divide the revenue then, 70% to the author and 30% to the platform, which has specified that “each content of the Series must respect TikTok’s guidelines“.
For the time being, only a limited number of creators will have the opportunity to try out the Series because the Chinese application wants to gather feedback from users and understand whether and what changes to make before making the service available on a global scale, which also in terms of the type of revenue sharing resembles the emergence of OnlyFans and Patreon‘s premium content, for which one has to pay.
Ever longer videos on social media
The few creators selected by the Chinese in this first phase will be allowed to test the 20-minute videos first, which is the last step of continuous growth in terms of duration. In the beginning, when it was still Musical.ly and the clips were a sequence of playback clips in which anonymous protagonists simulated the lyrics of a song, the duration increased from 15 to 60 seconds. Then TikTok increased the length to three minutes, up to the 10-minute videos launched last year.
Now with the doubling of time, the bet is on the authors’ creative skills but also on followers’ willingness to pay and follow much longer clips. We will see if and what will come in the coming weeks, in particular from Meta and YouTube, which are the two giants that are suffering from the continuous growth of TikTok, even if it seems clear and generalised that there is a tendency to increase the length of videos to be published on social media.