Short video terms, explained
Three short pages defining the ideas this whole product runs on, written for someone who has never made a video before. No jargon, no acronyms, and no numbers we made up.
What does it mean when a video is "blowing up"?
A video is blowing up when it is gaining views much faster than the account that posted it normally does. It is a rate, not a total. A clip with 40,000 views from an account with 900 followers, posted yesterday, is blowing up. A clip with 2 million views from an account with 4 million followers, posted last year, is not.
Read the full answerWhat is frame-level video analysis?
Frame-level video analysis means a tool watches the actual video: what is on screen in each shot, when the cuts happen, what text appears, and what is said out loud. Most tools that claim to analyse videos never open the video at all — they read the caption, the hashtags and the view count, which is the packaging rather than the thing itself.
Read the full answerWhat is a pattern lesson, and how do you use one?
A pattern lesson names the one technique that made a video work, explains why it works on people, and shows where else the same technique fits. It is the part you can reuse. The subject of the video usually is not.
Read the full answerHow to go viral on TikTok, according to 1,328 videos that did
Most advice about going viral is repeated opinion. These are counted findings from 1,328 viral short videos we analysed frame by frame: 56.3% contain no spoken words at all, 53.2% open on a visual hook rather than a line of dialogue, 69.4% ask the viewer for nothing, and the median viral TikTok is built from just 5 cuts. The pattern is a strong first frame, fast visual storytelling, and no ask at the end.
Read the full answerHow many views does a video need to count as viral?
There is no fixed number. "Viral" is a ratio, not a total: a video is spreading when the platform shows it to far more people than the account could reach on its own. A workable threshold is ten times the creator's follower count — across 2,593 breakout videos we captured, the median was played 45.7 times its creator's following and 76.5% cleared ten times.
Read the full answerDo faceless videos go viral? What the data says
Yes — and they are not the exception. Of 1,328 viral short videos we analysed frame by frame, 56.3% contained no spoken words at all: no voiceover, no piece to camera, nobody talking. On TikTok that rises to 66.3%. Faceless, wordless content is the mainstream of what spreads, not a compromise for people who dislike being on camera.
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See it on a real video
Every idea on these pages shows up in our published breakdowns — full scene timings, transcripts and the technique behind each video, free to read.