The app is offering incentives for creators who post long-form landscape videos, but many remain skeptical

The message sent to creators detailed that the video’s width must be larger than its height. To be eligible, videos must be original content, cannot be ads or from governments or political accounts, and must follow community guidelines.

The push toward long-form horizontal content on TikTok has been underway for a while. The platform has steadily increased the length of videos from 60 seconds to 3 minutes, to 10 minutes, and now 30 minutes in select markets. Now, in a bid to compete with YouTube and streaming services like Netflix, TikTok is hoping to get users to rotate their phones and consume content in a more traditional form.

So far, creators have met the news with outrage and frustration. “I don’t see how horizontal long-form content would ever survive on the platform, or how the platform would survive an influx of that kind of stuff,” said Noah Jennings, a TikTok creator in Florida with over 1 million followers on the app.

“When I go on TikTok, I want to be served videos that are quick,” said Jennings. “I can get my entertainment and brain-rot dosage and move to the next thing. TikTok is losing sight of what made them unique, trying to become everything and I think it’s just going to implode.”

TikTok has made aggressive moves to reposition itself as an entertainment app. According to a report from Insider Intelligence, TikTok users are spending almost as much time on the platform as users do on Netflix, and the company has been open about its ambitions to take on streaming and long-form entertainment to capture more ad dollars and keep users hooked for longer on their platform.

Besides gaming, streaming is the largest category when it comes to consumer advertising spend on mobile, according to a report from Data.ai.

In a 2020 meeting with shareholders, Netflix mentioned TikTok as a major competitor. “TikTok’s growth is astounding,” the letter stated, “showing the fluidity of internet entertainment.”

“I actually wouldn’t underestimate horizontal content,” said Sara Wilson, founder of digital strategy consultancy SW Projects. “I’ve always been amazed by the degree to which TikTok prioritizes absolutely horrible looking formats, and they win. It might not be on current user behavior, but I wouldn’t underestimate it becoming the norm.”

Many creators and industry experts see the move as a more direct threat to YouTube, which remains the primary destination for long-form social media video content.

“It’s interesting that a platform that reinvented how we consume content is now asking people to go back to the ‘legacy’ way of thinking,” said Sid Raskind, a content creator with over 4.4 million followers on TikTok. “Obviously, the only reason is ad dollars, but this means overall short-form vertical content may fizzle out and be a memory for a lot of career creators. I hope that people can still grow with vertical and not be shoehorned into only making horizontal.”

But producing long-form content, especially in a horizontal format, requires tremendous extra effort, from shooting to editing, and many creators said they resented TikTok for the added workload.

“I feel like TikTok is changing so much,” said Asante Madrigal, a Gen Z TikTok creator who posts about pop culture and the news. “Every couple months, they change their tools and what it means to be a creator. It’s hard to keep up with.”

Madrigal already produces multiple videos daily for the app, but also has to publish across YouTube Shorts, Snapchat and Instagram. “I don’t think it’s likely that I’ll post horizontal, I can barely keep up with vertical content,” he said.

Emmy Speens, a TikTok content creator in New York City said that she also wouldn't be posting horizontally. Even with TikTok promising to boost views of horizontal content, she doesn't believe her followers will engage.

“The whole appeal of TikTok is the easy swiping,” she said. “It’s the quickness, the one-handedness, it’s the ease of use that attracted people to TikTok in the first place.”

She and other creators also worry that filming horizontally would change the nature of their content. All of TikTok’s video editing tools and AI-generated backgrounds are built for vertical shots. “Filming vertically gives [the video] a more lived-in perspective,” Speens said. “It fills the screen really nicely, it keeps you from being distracted.”

Still, Speens said that she understands the appeal of longer-form content, though to her, that sort of thing seems more at home on YouTube. “For creators that feel flattened by short-form content, YouTube is a great way to do both,” she said.

Some TikTok creators have already made the jump from short-form to long-form, abandoning TikTok in favor of becoming full-time YouTube creators.

Tejas Hullur, a 23-year-old YouTuber in New York, initially started out creating videos on TikTok. However, as he developed a deeper interest in filmmaking, he found the platform limiting. “Every time I upload on TikTok, it kind of feels like pulling a slot machine lever,” he said. “With YouTube, it doesn't feel as volatile.”

He also appreciates the deeper bond he’s able to build with his audience on YouTube. He recently produced a 28-minute deep-dive film on dating apps, loneliness and the state of modern romance. It’s the type of content he felt like he previously couldn’t have made on TikTok. “When I was uploading on TikTok,” he said, “I was uploading 60-second videos because I felt like I could only really scratch the surface.”

YouTube also offers a more stable and robust monetization program for creators, and its deep library of content means videos can amass views years after creators post them. “I upload a video on TikTok and in a month, it's gone from the algorithm,” said Hullur. “On YouTube, it's a catalogue I'm building that can live a lot longer than anything on TikTok.”

Christy Gibson, a physician and trauma therapist who posts to over 131,000 followers on TikTok under the handle @tiktoktraumadoc, said that she’s excited about the opportunities that might come with longer-form content on the app. “I’ve been catering to shorter attention spans with one minute videos, but I really look forward to doing more deeper content for people who are like, okay, I want to spend more time with this topic,” she said.

But while she’s on board with longer content, she too remains skeptical that many people will want to consume that content horizontally on an app built for vertical scrolling. Still, she said, if TikTok is pushing those types of videos, she’ll post them “for the algorithmic boost.”

Speens is not yet convinced and draws a comparison to Quibi, one of the greatest fails of the internet era, which flopped despite having two huge names, film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, as its founders. They touted the app’s key selling point as being that one could watch videos either vertically or horizontally, the latter of which most people had no interest in. Quibi shut down after just eight months.

“Nowadays, it’s hard to even discern what TikTok wants to be,” Speens said. “It really is kind of confusing what they’re aiming for. Like, do they want to be Quibi?”