Douyin, the most popular social video app in China, now supports 15-minute long videos, 36Kr reports.
Longer video dramatically broadens the scope of creation on Douyin, and, in particular, plays into the platform’s efforts to promote vlog video diaries—an increasingly popular form of video entertainment in China.
The lengthened video-limit represents quite the jump from Douyin’s early days when only 15-second videos were allowed. From there, the platform gradually expanded towards 1-minute, and then 5-minute, videos.
Now, Douyin is creeping closer into the territory of platforms like Bilibili, a YouTube-like platform that specializes in ad-supported long-form video, and Weibo.
Since launching in September 2016, Douyin has grown its user base to more than 250 million daily users and 500 million monthly users, eclipsing competitors like Kuaishou, which stands at 210 million dailies currently, and Bilibili, with 101 million monthly users in Q1 2019.
Douyin’s user base is also within range of China’s premium video streaming sites, namely Baidu’s iQiyi, Tencent Video, and Alibaba’s Youku, which have, respectively, 543 million, 540 million, and 413 million monthly users.
According to QuestMobile data cited by 36Kr, the number of mobile users in China reached 1.136 billion in April, of which short video users have exceeded 800 million.