After YouTube successfully adopted TikTok's short video tutorial, TikTok is doing the same by increasing the app's video limit to 60 minutes as the battle for users' attention heats up.

TikTok’s push into long-form social video may come as a surprise, considering the vertical short-form video model has since been copied by most social media platforms, from Instagram to YouTube to even LinkedIn. But despite the crowded field and a potential U.S. ban on the horizon, TikTok is still managing to capture user attention.

In January 2023, eMarketer found that TikTok would surpass YouTube in average daily time spent on social videos in 2022, with 52 minutes to YouTube’s 46 minutes. In December, it predicted that TikTokers would spend an average of 55 minutes per day on the app — about 5 minutes more than YouTube users and even more than Netflix’s average.

Still, YouTube Shorts has proven itself a worthy rival to TikTok less than four years after its launch. In 2023 alone, Shorts surpassed 2 billion users and amassed more than 50 billion views per day. This upward trend is all the more notable given that TikTok’s user growth had slowed dramatically by the end of 2023.