It’s been a long mystery, but after doing the TikTok Challenge (Making 4 High Quality Videos, everyday for 7 days), we found out how the TikTok Algorithm works. If you have some time, we created a 20 min in-depth look about our experience starting from an average TikTok user to becoming a trending user within a week, but if you don’t have time to watch it… this article will be a quick explanation on how TikTok broadcasts your videos on other’s For You pages, and why good videos fail while bad videos trend.
But again I strongly recommend to watch the “I Hate TikTok” Video because it shows our success and failures with our videos, our in-depth analysis in the algorithm, and 5 reasons I hate TikTok overall… and if you’re still reading… you probably just want the quick 3 minutes explanation. Okay, let’s get this started.
TikTok broadcasts your video to 300–500 Random users in the application based on your hashtags and videos you have historically created (If you made videos about anime, you will be more likely recommended to people who watch anime viewers). These 300–500 viewers are your judges, and they will determine your videos ability to become viral or not.
Your performance is based on 4 crucial stats:
- Views
- Shares
- Likes
- Video Completion (they watched your video completely from beginning to end)
Views, Shares and Likes are important, but the biggest stat TikTok views is Video Completion. The longer a user is on their app, the better. Now this may sound strange, what is the difference between a view and watching completely?
From our current knowledge, a view is considered someone watching a clip for more than 5 seconds, while a video complete really depends when your video ends. From our example, we had a 15 second video. If the video was swiped away around the 8 second mark it would count as a view, but would not count as a completely watched video.
In TikTok out of the 300 people who view your video first, your goal is to reach 300 points for TikTok to consider it a viral video. While these are estimated distribution scores, this is a good way for you to visualize the point total:
- If a Video is 90–100% watched fully — 1 Point
- If a Video is stopped around the 50% mark— 0 Points
- If a video is looped — 2 Points
The image above helps detail how your video’s total viewership can affect your outreach on TikTok. This does not account for followers you currently have, but the 300 random users TikTok shows the video too will determine it’s outreach success. Simply put, if you get less than 50% users watching your video fully, the video will not succeed, this is why TikTokers re-upload videos to try to re-aggravate TikTok to get 300 new “judges”.
This is why a lot of TikTok users create videos for 7 seconds, it forces a loop as fast as possible and in TikTok’s algorithm that’s +1 or +2.
But there is another factor that changes this logic, regardless if your videos are good or not, the order which it is shown to your “300 judges” will drastically change if how well your video is perceived, and I call it the TikTok Order.
Everytime a user opens their app their front page is set in the TikTok Order
- TikTok Creators they follow
- Popular TikTok videos/ Popular TikTok creators newest videos [At least one video with 10K Views]
- New Users to TikTok (under 10 videos posted)
- Regular TikTok Users (Created 10+ Videos but did not hit viral [under 10K Views on any video])
On average, a regular user spends 50+ minutes on TikTok a day. If they used TikTok 10 minutes at a time, this would be the time estimates for the content that user sees. The Regular user gets the least amount of time, and they are shown last out of the 4 sections, regardless how good or relatable your video is to the demographic.
Previously the logic was, if our 300 Judges liked our video, we would be successful, but the reality is if you post your content around the same time as Popular Tiktok Users, and New Users, as a regular TikTok creator, you will be ranked the lowest and shown last. And if a user is exhausted from watching 10 minutes worth of videos, they will stop and close the app on your video. Not because its good or bad but because they hit their attention span limit. That’s why if your video isn’t doing so well, your judges were exhausted by the time they reached your video.
The logic makes sense for TikTok, your show videos that keep users in the app, then promote new users to keep those people in the app… it’s hard to find good new content creators in a system bombarded by click-bait videos ranking higher.
And what makes it worse, TikTok segregates content. This means if you created 10 videos in the past about an anime like Naruto, if you decide to make a singing video it will flagged by TikTok as “lower potential for views” and shown to less viewers as a result (instead of 300 judges, maybe 150 judges). So you are stuck competing with bigger/popular tiktokers pushing your content back on the TikTok For You page order.
So at the end of the day the Algorithm honestly sucks because it encourages low quality click bait videos over high quality and interesting content that match your ideal demographic.
Also you can’t directly make money off of TikTok… no monetization program, so… even if you got 1 million views it means nothing unless you put a lot of hard work establishing business relations or opening a Patreon/ “donation” account. Not like this was related to the algorithm just wanted to mention this to people who think they’ll become rich off TikTok instantly.
And that’s about it. If this was interesting for you, well you should totally watch our full video, “I Hate TikTok”, and see my 5 reason why I hate TikTok and behind the scenes of how our content hit over 100,000 views in 1 week.
You can also watch our full length original TikToks with the intended music https://www.tiktok.com/@supasenpai
Special Thanks to our guest stars:
Kyatorin: https://www.tiktok.com/@kyatorin
https://www.instagram.com/kyatorin/
Ayenomz: https://www.tiktok.com/@ayenomz https://www.instagram.com/ayenomz/
Cat: https://www.tiktok.com/@cat.liketheanimal https://www.instagram.com/cat.liketheanimal/
Sara: https://www.tiktok.com/@real_wondersara https://www.instagram.com/real_wondersara/
