TikTok is Now Pushing More Landscape Videos Over Vertical Shorts

TikTok is reportedly incentivizing its content creators to produce more horizontal videos rather than the usual vertical shorts.

Several influences noted of receiving an alert from TikTok, encouraging them to produce minute-long 16x9 horizontal videos to receive boosted views for 72 hours after uploading.

Posted screenshots of TikTok's new guide include instructions for influencers to add "#longervideos" to qualify for a better view boost.

The video-streaming platform said the number of boosted views will vary on "many factors, such as video quality and follower count."

TikTok Pioneers YouTube-Like Format on Vertical-Oriented Platform

TikTok has been pushing for more YouTube-format videos with longer run times for quite some time as the platform tries to attract long-form video creators that regularly generate millions of views.

The platform has even allowed 30-minute-long videos on the platform, a far cry from the less-than-a-minute-long videos that populated the video-sharing site for a long time.

This is in addition to the platform allowing more videogame streamers on the site, many of which use the horizontal feature to fully capture their gameplay footage.

So far, the new initiative has been met with a lot of pushback after content creators and users complained that TikTok's horizontal format is a "clunky experience."

The return to traditional YouTube format in videos is a left turn for many as other social media platforms have been trying to replicate TikTok's success in its short-video scroll-down format.

Even YouTube introduced Shorts as a direct competition to TikTok, albeit at a much lesser success.

TikTok's Changes Open the Way for Creators to Move to Other Platforms

The changing "streaming meta" on TikTok has pushed many of its content creators to dip into other social media platforms suited to their niche.

Essay-type creators have begun posting long-form videos on YouTube, while others have begun to move to Instagram, Facebook, and even X (formerly Twitter).

Meta's Facebook and Instagram currently have the highest pay the most to its partnered influencers at the price of much stricter policies and more demanding requirements to enter.