First came Covid
Of all the time people in MENA spend consuming media (across a range of platforms), it's estimated that 15% of that time is on short-form videos.
Enter our favorite entertainer — TikTok. This is really where short-form videos found their home. This creator app is where the action happens and most creators share their content. TikTok is hardly fazed by competition because of its variety, popularity and presence in our society. This success is also largely due to being owned by the mega-huge Chinese tech company, ByteDance.
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The OG video platform
YouTube has been getting kind of territorial over TikTok walking all over its "video" turf, and so these days it's been coming in strong with a bunch of incentives to keep people on its platform. First off, it introduced Shorts, which is its version of TikTok (aka, short videos of people singing, dancing, cooking, dishing out stock tips etc). And on top of that, to make sure ya'll are creating content on its platform, it's introduced a $100 million Shorts Fund — quite the incentive for those of you who've been contemplating making a career out of short videos but don't necessarily have the patience to build an audience in order to monetize through sponsors. In fact, the fund is made to reward content creators who make the best short-form videos on YouTube Shorts from 2021 to 2022. Is it time to start a YouTube gig?
Other platforms that want a piece of the pie
The competition is rising. Now with YouTube's generous funding and TikTok's unbeatable success — Twitch, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook have also introduced their fair share of short-form video promotion tools. This means one thing for sure: short-form videos are here to stay.
Fun fact: Did you know that about 50 million people consider themselves creators? SignalFire has reported that these millions of people are majorly on Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch. And the creator economy still has a long way to go!
How short is short?
Well, MENA users apparently spend 90 minutes per day (on average) watching short videos online. Now, this is A LOT of videos, but we reckon their attention span is limited to 4-5 minutes per video when it comes to "shorts."
Now let's compare that to two and a half hours daily spent messaging on social media platforms. The ratio of engaging is higher than consuming, but they seem to go hand-in-hand.
On a personal note — we hope that everyone still manages to meet their exercise goals amidst all these sedentary activities.
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