What does it mean when a video is "blowing up"?

Why total views is the wrong number to look at

Total views tells you how big the account is, not whether the video worked. Large accounts get large numbers on almost everything they post, because the platform already shows their videos to a lot of people. If you sort a list of videos by views, you get a list of big accounts.

That list is useless if what you want is to learn what to make. The video you can learn from is the one that outperformed its own starting position — where the video did the work, not the follower count.

How we measure it

We score every video we find on three things, and rank by the result rather than by views:

• 1How many views it has picked up compared with the creator's follower count. Beating your own audience size by a wide margin means the platform is pushing the video to strangers.
• 2How long ago it was posted. The same view count means something very different at two days old than at two months old, so we treat views as a speed rather than a total.
• 3How much people did with it — likes, comments and shares against views. A video people share is being carried further than the algorithm alone would carry it.

What the labels on our pages mean

We turn that score into a position within the niche rather than showing you a raw number, because a raw number has no meaning without something to compare it to. "Surging" is the top 5% of what we found for that niche this week. "Rising fast" is the top 20%. "Climbing" is the top half. "Steady" is everything else we kept.

The comparison group is always the same niche over the same seven days. A skincare video is compared with other skincare videos, not with the whole platform.

Why speed matters more than size if you make videos

A format that is accelerating is a format that still has room. By the time something has 20 million views and a name, everybody has already made their version and the audience is tired of it. The useful window is while a format is still climbing.

That is the whole reason we rank this way. We are not trying to show you the biggest videos on the internet. We are trying to show you the ones you could still be early to.

What this measure cannot tell you

It cannot tell you a video is good. A video can accelerate because it is upsetting, or because it is using a sound that is being pushed that week, or because it got picked up by one large account. It also cannot see paid promotion — a boosted video looks like a fast one from the outside.

It is a way of finding videos worth looking at. Whether a format is worth copying is a judgement you make after watching it.