I tracked the best videos that went viral from small creators. Here's what I discovered.

I got curious about something. Everyone assumes going viral means jumping on whatever trend is blowing up right now. So I went and pulled a bunch of videos specifically from small creators, accounts under 1,000 followers, that still managed to blow past everything else they'd ever posted.

Here's the thing that stood out. Big creators mostly go viral by setting a trend first, then everyone else copies the format for weeks after. Small creators almost never go viral that way. Nearly every outlier video I found from a small account was doing something that did not look like a trend at all, it looked like they just made something new and it happened to hit.

A few examples. One small cooking account, under 1,000 followers, wasn't doing the usual recipe format everyone else in that niche was copying that month. Instead they posted a blunt, kind of ranty video reviewing cheap kitchen gadgets they regretted buying. It was just an honest opinion video, and it did about 40 times their normal views.

Another one, a small fitness creator with maybe 300 followers, skipped the workout routine format completely and just posted a raw video about a dumb mistake they made trying to hit a lift too heavy. That one alone did more views than their last 20 videos combined.

Same pattern with a small home organization account, barely 500 followers. While everyone else was doing the same "clean with me" trend, they posted a weirdly specific video about one drawer they'd been avoiding for a year.

None of these were jumping on a sound, a challenge, or a format that was already circulating. They just made something that did not exist yet.

Honestly the thing I like about TikTok is that followers still matter for consistency, but they clearly don't gate virality. Every one of these accounts had barely anyone watching before, and the app pushed the video out anyway because the video itself earned it. That doesn't really happen the same way on other platforms.

So if you're trying to go viral, I think copying the big creators is actually the wrong move. You're just entering a trend late after the algorithm has already moved on. You'd probably have better luck studying what small creators are doing when they're not following a trend, since that is apparently where the real breakout videos are coming from.

Btw, I used another online tool to pull these up instead of digging through accounts manually, it lets you filter viral videos by creator size, which made it a lot easier to isolate the small-creator outliers instead of getting flooded with big-account results.

Anyone else noticed this, that the small creators who blow up are usually not following a trend at all? Do you agree?

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NotCryptoKing•5 days ago•1

Ai slop

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