Shorter Is Different: Characterizing the Dynamics of Short-Form Video Platforms

TL;DR

This study analyzes the unique characteristics of short-form video platforms like Kuaishou, revealing significant differences from traditional long-form platforms in video length, content categories, user interaction, and creator success rates.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale, data-driven comparison between short-form and long-form video platforms, highlighting their distinctive content and user engagement patterns.

Findings

Videos are significantly shorter on Kuaishou compared to long-form platforms.

Life-related videos are over-represented in short-form platforms.

Top videos attract more user attention despite fewer interactions per view.

Abstract

The emerging short-form video platforms have been growing tremendously and become one of the leading social media recently. Although the expanded popularity of these platforms has attracted increasing research attention, there has been a lack of understanding of whether and how they deviate from traditional long-form video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and Bilibili. To address this, we conduct a large-scale data-driven analysis of Kuaishou, one of the largest short-form video platforms in China. Based on 248 million videos uploaded to the platform across all categories, we identify their notable differences from long-form video platforms through a comparison study with Bilibili, a leading long-form video platform in China. We find that videos are shortened by multiples on Kuaishou, with distinctive categorical distributions over-represented by life-related rather than interest-based videos. Users interact with videos less per view, but top videos can even more effectively acquire users' collective attention. More importantly, ordinary content creators have higher probabilities of producing hit videos. Our results shed light on the uniqueness of short-form video platforms and pave the way for future research and design for better short-form video ecology.