DNA Of Short Video Platforms - Part II
In Part I, I discussed the content duration and dimensions on short video platforms and their impact on user behavior and platform positioning.
Recap of Part I
As a brief recap, short videos are typically between 10 and 60 seconds long. The duration of a single unit of content loosely correlates to user behavior in number of sessions per day. However, the addictive nature of short videos, especially with a well personalized feed, results in 2-3x the average session time of typical social media usage. This causes the number of sessions to be similar to social media, but the overall daily time spent to be closer to YouTube and Netflix.
In short, TikTok is on its way to massively impacting Instagram and YouTube usage - we haven’t seen the impact of this yet, especially on YouTube, primarily due to the pandemic behavior where content consumption is up across the board. It remains to be seen how this changes in the post-pandemic world where the collective time spent on content must inevitably come down - which platforms will get to retain their engagement times is hard to predict yet.
Next, short videos are served in full-screen mode, bringing an immersive feed experience. This is highly engaging, but also makes it even more important to present relevant and interesting content much more quickly and often to sustain user interest.
Now let’s explore the next set of defining characteristics in short videos.
Creation Process
Short videos are generally recorded and edited on the phone. There are exceptions to this - the highly popular influencers have both crew and equipment to help them film videos with advanced edits. It is debatable as to what percentage of videos that appear on the feed are filmed and edited on the app vs offline. An app like TikTok that has millions of videos created daily is likely to have a good number of the top percentile videos being created with external editing tools.
But, let’s explore the history of UGC video apps to see how we got here. YouTube stubbornly did not offer any creation tools for users until very recently. Even now, it barely has tools that are worth using, considering the evolution this space has seen in the last decade. The dominant mode of posting a video on YouTube is to create it offline and upload it.
The top videos on YouTube are masterfully edited with professional editing tools. At Rizzle, we did some research on the average time it takes to make a YouTube video by inviting YouTubers to answer a series of prompts on Rizzle. The average reported time was about 7 hours to make 1-5 minutes of content! Reyes The Entrepreneur, a YouTuber with 400k+ subscribers, described it as an 8-12 hour process for him to make one YouTube video!
The process includes research, scripting, filming, editing, audio mixing, thumbnail creation, and SEO (so that the video has a chance of being discovered). Those are a lot of steps and tools to master for anyone trying to make it on YouTube!
Delving into the gender demographics of video editors, it turns out that only 24% of video editors are women. That, at least partially, explains why there are more male YouTubers than female. Even though that’s a really hard statistic to find in absolute terms, scanning the Top YouTuber lists make it really apparent (there are only 2 women in the top 30 list, as it turns out)! So, you start seeing articles like this talking about female YouTubers with over 1M subscribers instead!
The gender imbalance among YouTube creators speaks volumes about the process of making it on YouTube - it goes beyond creation, but the difficulty of the creation process is certainly one component of the problem.
The film industry’s woman problem also illustrates this problem quite well. If it is any consolation, there are more women in editor roles than other roles in the film industry!
I will explore the gender imbalance in the creator demographics separately as a topic, as it certainly goes well beyond the creation process itself.
The creation process on short video apps is drastically different. The last decade has seen phones become powerful devices capable of fairly complex video processing, animations, and much more. Short video platforms have changed the creation game by taking advantage of the device capabilities, much like Instagram did for photos.
Platforms like TikTok and Kuaishou have brought hundreds of filters, effects, templates, and other editing capabilities to the apps. In addition, for the power creators, both platforms have launched standalone apps that get beyond the basics of editing tools.
A vast majority of the content on short video platforms get created on the phone, and mostly on the specific app itself where the content is distributed. The ease of creation and the richness of creation and editing tools on the phone have led to proliferation of content.
But, more importantly, the gender imbalance is more than resolved with this model. In the US, more women are on TikTok than men (and creation ratios skew similarly). Although that is not true worldwide, the gap between genders is significantly lower even worldwide. And the gender imbalance that exists in certain countries has more to do with cultural differences than the creation process itself.
Aside: There are other issues with the audience gender imbalances on short video apps, with countries like India having staggering 90% male audiences - more about that in another post.
Making the creation process easier means that creators get to spend more time on their creativity than on the editing process itself. The richness of these tools is transforming the next generation of filmmaking itself
At Rizzle, we’ve extended the creation process to allow multiple creators to create content together remotely with just their phones and no post processing! With Rizzle collabs, multiple creators can create a video together remotely, with no editing. Rizzle’s Rimix feature allows an automatic mashup of multiple videos on a track, allowing anyone to become part of an official music video clip or create mashups with friends, all with zero editing!
Perhaps the most important thing to note about creation is that, while there is still a need to own some equipment to make great videos, the most expensive thing (the camera) is taken out of the equation! The equipment that one needs to own now to be a serious creator are the peripherals - tripod, ring light, microphone, and potentially a few other things, none of which are nearly as expensive as a 4K Digital SLR.
Not needing to own an expensive digital camera makes creation instantly accessible to millions more around the world, leveling the playing field across the wealth spectrum to a large extent!
The creation process on the phone is still in fairly nascent stages and there is a lot more to come in this area!
Popular Music
Any discussion of short videos is incomplete without referencing what it has done to the music industry. Even though there are plenty of video genres that have nothing to do with music, the availability of popular music is now table stakes for these platforms.
From opening up an entirely new revenue stream to re-popularizing old music, the impact of short videos on the music industry will be among the most historic transformations that industry has seen and likely will see for a long while to come.
But, the impact of popular music on short videos is also equally interesting. Even though it evolved out of an imagined use case, the impact is much more fundamental than the specific use case of dancing and lip syncing to music.
Clean and great audio is the most important quality of a good video, even more than the quality of the video itself. A high definition video with poor audio is received more poorly than a medium quality video with great audio. Numerous articles have been written about the importance of audio quality in videos.
User audio is subject to many issues, especially those recorded on the phones without a microphone or sound leveling. For vlogs and other types of content that rely on talking and interacting in other ways that does not involve music, the sound quality depends on a variety of factors - background noise, the environment around them, wind, traffic, etc. When recorded without an external microphone, these noises are amplified.
Further, some people are low talkers and some others are high talkers, some talk fast, some talk slow, and so on.
On a short video platform, when the feed presents several diverse videos, this can all result in a large variation in user audio levels and quality, making the experience extremely tiring. It can require the viewer to have to adjust their device volumes with each video, which is not a great user experience.
Now imagine adjusting the volume up or down every 15-20 seconds on a short video app for content from creators who you don’t even know - that’s a disastrous experience! Even if the user may not explicitly understand why, this type of usage leads to fatigue, which then turns away audiences.
Podcasters and expert vloggers on YouTube are cognizant of this and often use external audio equipment and pristine sound. They also weave in sound effects and background music. Podcasters often have an elaborate home setup for great audio!
Expert speakers also know that they need high energy in their voices and need to say something that engages the audience within a few seconds. This is extremely difficult for the average creator. More about making engaging content in a future post.
When the idea of “just pick up your phone and record” is perpetuated, a nuance often left out is how it can impact the audio quality and hence the video quality of content!
When videos have professional music for background and the creator is only making the video aspect of the content, the pristine audio already makes that content infinitely more watchable than a video with average quality original audio. With popular music incorporated, it goes one step further in video quality and watchability, due to the familiarity of the tunes and potential widespread liking.
On platforms like TikTok, where content has gone far beyond the music-based videos, the talking videos that make it to the top feed are from creators who do follow all the rules for great audio and have exceptionally high energy in their voices. Or, it is from creators who are lip syncing to audio tracks from creators who make great audio!
On Rizzle, popular music is being used in short series or even movie reviews to spruce up the content. This is not something that was available to short series makers on YouTube or elsewhere, forcing them to rely on less relatable music that they may be able to license on their own. The incorporation of a short popular music clip instantly makes the series more relatable, increasing its watchability!
In a nutshell, the short video apps have shifted storytelling to a dimension where many if not most stories are told with music as the backdrop. This goes well beyond lip syncing and dancing - any short video platform must have popular music in its offering to be considered seriously!
Takeaway: The creation process has firmly shifted to making videos and even entire series on the phone, with short video platforms offering amazing creation experiences. This has also helped even out the gender imbalance in video creators. Popular music has gone beyond the lip sync and dance videos and is now an integral part of video creation on short video apps.
To Be Continued…
Stay tuned for Part III (and subscribe!).