DNA Of Short Video Platforms - Part I
Bonus: Brief notes on other media formats and relative usage patterns
What defines a media format? The technical definition of media formats gets into types of image and video files. But more broadly, a media format is a distinctly defined type of content that can be created and shared.
Every time a new media format is introduced, as platforms supporting the formats evolve, they end up creating a subliminal DNA for each media format.
Even something as small as a link has a DNA - links are generally displayed in blue and sometimes with an underline, which we now have come to identify upon first glance as clickable text.
Stories, for example, are now universally known as sub 10-second ephemeral updates that get added to the top of a feed in small circles containing your profile photo and last 24 hours. This is true even if they are given new names such as Fleets.
Pet Peeve: We need to stop copying a widely known feature with no significant changes and renaming it to achieve a sense of innovation!
Stories are also generally associated with frequent updates that you can afford to miss. Even though it was initially designed as a means to introduce FOMO due to the ephemerality, in today’s world of ubiquitous oversharing, it no longer drives the type of FOMO that it was meant to. However, some stories do drive that FOMO for a small audience (e.g., exes).
“Feed” was synonymous with the Facebook feed format, with generally unequal length posts and infinite scrolling that led to a bottomless pit of content. Numerous apps have adopted the Facebook style news feed for all kinds of content.
Pinterest created a variation of the feed with a two-column UI. Many apps tried this model out, Etsy being the most successful other platform to do this. But the future points to highly immersive full-screen experiences on this front!
Short Videos: A New Media Format
Short videos are a new media format that have been evolving for the last decade or so. By now, there is a strong DNA associated with short video platforms.
Duration
Short videos are generally less than 60-seconds long, with average durations hovering in the 15-20s range. Keeping with the use case of lip sync videos, this started out to be the case since the underlying music clips on these platforms, especially in early days, were 15s long. As it turns out, this short format is the right evolution for the generation whose attention span has shrunk to 8 seconds.
Even though Vine brought even shorter content with 6 second duration (a deliberate decision at the time), that did not stick as the dominant duration of short video format. It is a little nebulous to speculate the reason for it, although if we must, one possible reason could be that the spectrum of content that becomes possible within 6s is fairly limited. Vine itself shut down because of Twitter’s ineptitude in assimilating acquisitions and handling other platforms outside its core business, but that’s for another post.
In this world, the average duration of YouTube videos being ~12 minutes seems disconnected from reality. Creators who wish to monetize on YouTube strive to achieve at least 8 minutes so that mid-roll ads can be placed in their videos. At that level, YouTube consumption time starts competing with other longer media formats, such as Netflix. The increasing consumption of YouTube on larger screens confirms this evolving identity for YouTube.
The duration of a piece of content defines the situations and contexts under which that content is consumed and by extension, loosely determines the competing platforms.
The unit time taken for a task (e.g., sending/reading a message or watching a video) tends to influence the number of daily sessions on these platforms. Psychologically, if the unit time is smaller, it is tempting to come back often (“I can just watch one video and get back to my homework!”). Longer the unit time, more the upfront and deliberate (psychological) commitment needed to start it.
The unit time largely ends up determining when we tend to use these apps - between tasks vs end of the day, and so on.
The unit time to consume content on messaging, social media, and short video platforms is small (~20 seconds). Hence these apps tend to have higher number of daily sessions compared to YouTube and Netflix, where the unit time (e.g., time to watch one video) tends to run into 10s of minutes.
However, the average session times on these platforms tell an interesting story. Short video platforms, despite having a unit time similar to other social media apps, have 2-3x the average session time of social media apps.
The average session times for successful short video apps are around 5-6 minutes, which is nearly twice that on Instagram. TikTok’s worldwide average is 10.85 minutes, while its US average is in the 5-6 minute range.
Even though the average video duration (and hence unit time) on YouTube is in the range of the global average session time on TikTok, it psychologically leads to a much more deliberate content consumption model. For Gen Z, this is starting to compete with OTT content. YouTube’s own drive towards YouTube TV and other professional quality content makes this even more so the case.
Takeaway: The small unit time on short video platforms competes with the Instagrams of the world, while the addictive content, particularly on TikTok, leads to a total daily time that competes with YouTube and Netflix.
Content Dimensions
Short video platforms offer an immersive full screen experience with 9x16 videos. Vine did not do it, but after Snapchat proved that vertical videos had 9x better engagement than horizontal videos on mobile, more people paid attention to it. Kauishou and Musical.ly definitely went down that route to the point where now that has become the only way to present content on short video apps.
Filmmakers and serious content creators resisted the trend as a fad for a long time. This is a community that has considered anything other than horizontal videos as not meant for anyone who wishes to create serious content. Horizontal videos allow for peripheral vision elements to play out in scenes, which is very useful to set up grand views, landscapes, and other setups. It also mirrors the way the human eye itself takes in a scene. Vertical videos require fundamental rethinking in how to frame scenes and the types of content that work well.
Also, for the longest time, social apps had feeds that display a lot of secondary data with the primary content - be it likes or captions or comments. This meant that even visual content is surrounded by text and metadata. This also meant that each post occupied varied vertical space on the screen.
Instagram limited the number of variations in post lengths, starting with just 1x1 and then slowly conceding to other popular digital camera dimensions, but never quite getting to 9x16 or the full-screen portrait mode content. This may have been partly influenced by the fact that the iOS camera was also stuck in non 9x16 formats for a long while. Also, the phone screens back then were themselves smaller and hence, the posts were designed to fit on the screen.
These feeds also allowed for a peekaboo model where you can look ahead at more content so that you can keep scrolling for a bit longer with the anticipation of running into interesting content.
But there is absolutely no denying the immersive nature of the vertical video experience on the phone. There is something more deeply engaging about the same content when viewed in full-screen mode.
Full-screen vertical video apps have become highly creative about presenting information, actions, and more content to watch. Rizzle’s secondary feed shown above, in contrast to Instagram, allows for more episodes from the channel to be binge watched with a left swipe on the main feed.
The full screen mode of content presentation, however, amplifies the urgency to present interesting content right on the first post.
On average, it takes less than 3 seconds for a user to swipe away from a post they don’t like. Further, it also makes giving up easy if interesting content is not made available within the first few posts.
Often times, the relevance of content shown on a short video platform largely depends on the entertainment value of the content only. On friend and follow-based social networks, the relative affinity of the creator plays a role in the value of the content to the viewer. We put up with or even enjoy mediocre content shared by someone we know, but demand the absolute best when it is from strangers (at least until an affinity can develop towards the creator).
To that end, short video apps with a full-screen feed need to present a lot more compelling content to the user more often. Some apps rely on professionally generated content to achieve that goal. TikTok has been able to achieve that with UGC, largely due to its incredible level of feed personalization. It is important to note that the choice of content presented to a new user, before any personalization can kick in, must also lead to high engagement here.
This all presents a challenge to new short video apps - in order to compete for attention in the TikTok era, platforms need a comprehensive operation that includes seeded content with sufficient diversity, creator tools for great and repeatable UGC, and exceptional personalization. More about these challenges in a future post.
Takeaway: Full-screen vertical video is the only way content will be presented on mobile going forward. Innovation on content, creator tools, and AI will be critical for success. Content formats and creation for the vertical screen need to be reimagined - a change that needs to be embraced even by the filmmaking community, not just the social media creation community.
To Be Continued…
Stay tuned for Part II (and subscribe!).