Social media platforms TikTok and YouTube are in an increasingly heated battle to win over more users.
TikTok adopted two new upgrades this week to help mirror its competitor, Google-owned YouTube, including changes to its editing process and livestreaming. Now, creators can edit their videos in the app to include up to 2,200 character-long descriptions, similar to YouTube’s option to include lengthy descriptions full of outside links.
Livestream capability on TikTok will no longer be available to users under 18 after Nov. 23, per a Monday announcement from the platform. As many as five different users can now join a single livestream, while also giving the streamers the option to change their audience preferences and stream only for adults. Meanwhile, YouTube has an extra page on its site to display only live videos, which has 15.4 million subscribers, according to its site.
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Google has likewise made upgrades to compete against TikTok within the last month. It has already promised YouTubers 45% of the revenue they make when creating “Shorts,” YouTube’s version of TikTok that includes short-form videos. While TikTok earned about $4 billion in ad revenue last year, only the top 4% of its videos have reportedly found monetized status via its Pulse program.
Last week, YouTube introduced handles, meant to reflect those used across platforms in a way to become more uniform, which Tiktok has used from its beginning. This way, when one of its YouTubers is discovered on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, they can be more easily found on YouTube’s platform through a URL that includes the handle and is attached to a channel.
Both TikTok and YouTube tote the largest population of U.S. teenage users, with 95% reporting they have used YouTube and 67% reporting they have used TikTok, per a Pew Research Center poll.
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Facebook is also attempting to compete with TikTok and YouTube’s complex algorithms, by making its “artificial intelligence systems smarter and more responsive,” according to a press release earlier this month. This way, the content suggested to its users in their feeds can be more personalized than they are on other video platforms.
