Does having followers actually get you more views?
November 2026
−41%TikTok creators with 100k+ followers are getting 41% fewer views per video than they did in early 2025.
TikTok and Instagram now push videos based on what people like watching, not just who they follow. We looked at 562,163 videos from 1,991 creators—from under 100 followers to over 10 million—to see what that changed.
The top lessons you can use
- Don't wait for followers before you post: most of a small account's views already come from people who don't follow it.
- If you have a big following, don't count on it. Big accounts' views per video are falling; judge each video on its own and keep testing formats.
- Followers still help, but each 10× in followers buys roughly 2–3× the views on TikTok (about 4× on Instagram), not 10×. A better hook usually moves views more than a bigger audience.
- Compare yourself with your own last few months, not with accounts of your size: the gap between accounts of the same size is huge.
Key points
TikTok creators with 100k+ followers now get 41% fewer views per video than they did in early 2025 (creators over 1M get 54% fewer).
Creators under 10k followers held steady, and a typical video on an account under 1k followers gets 2.1× more views than the account has followers.
Having 10× more followers gets you about 2.6× the views on TikTok (down from 2.9× in early 2025) and 4.3× on Instagram—nowhere near 10×.
A typical video from an account under 1k followers gets about 450 views; from a 100k–1M account, about 9,600. Across a full month, the smaller account beats the bigger one only 5% of the time.
The specifics
Big TikTok accounts are getting 41% fewer views per video
We compared each creator's recent videos (July–October 2026) with their own videos from early 2025. TikTok creators who already had 100k+ followers are getting 41% fewer views per video, and creators over 1M followers are getting 54% fewer. Three out of four big accounts saw their typical views drop.
Small accounts held steady—and get most of their views from non-followers
Creators under 10k followers didn't see that drop. Even for an account with under 1,000 followers, a typical video gets about 450 views—2.1× their follower count. That only happens because TikTok shows new videos to people who don't follow you yet.
10× more followers only gets you about 2.6× more views
Followers still give you a higher floor, just nowhere near 1-for-1. On TikTok, a creator with 100,000 followers gets about 7× the views of a creator with 1,000 followers—not 100×. That gap has shrunk slightly since early 2025 (from 2.9× down to 2.6× for every 10× in followers).
Why you see 200k accounts getting 100-follower views
Single videos on big accounts now stall out when viewers scroll past them, while a strong video on a tiny account can take off. Across a whole month of posts, though, a 100k–1M TikTok account still averages about 9,600 views per video vs. about 450 for an account under 1k. The smaller account beats the bigger one across a full month only 5% of the time.
The drop started in late 2025—before the US TikTok sale
Many creators blamed the January 2026 US TikTok deal for their drop in views. In the data, the slide started in autumn 2025 (around November 2025), and big creators outside the US lost just as many views (−46%) as US creators (−40%).
Followers still matter more on Instagram
On Instagram, having 10× more followers gets you about 4.3× the views, compared to 2.6× on TikTok. Instagram still sends a bigger share of your views from people who already follow you.
How the same creators' views changed since early 2025
To make this a fair comparison, we measured each creator against their own past videos: their typical views per video in July–October 2026 compared with January–June 2025, grouped by how many followers they had back in early 2025.
TikTok
Typical (median) change for creators in each group; number of creators in brackets.
10× more followers gets you about 2.6× the views on TikTok
Each month, we compared creators in the same niche to see how many times more views a creator with 10× more followers got on a typical video. If followers didn't help at all, the line would sit at 1×.
TikTok went from 2.9× in early 2025 to 2.6× in late 2026. Instagram averaged 4.3× over the last six months (299 creators). Vertical bars show the margin of error.
What a typical TikTok video gets at each follower size
Typical views per video each quarter, grouped by how many followers the creator had at the time. Notice how the top two lines (100k–1M and 1M+) slope down over 2025 and 2026, while smaller accounts stay much flatter.
| Followers | 2025 Q1 | 2025 Q2 | 2025 Q3 | 2025 Q4 | 2026 Q1 | 2026 Q2 | 2026 Q3 | 2026 Q4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1k | 772 4.3× followers | 679 2.6× followers | 596 2.4× followers | 712 2.6× followers | 665 3.2× followers | 638 2.8× followers | 579 2.4× followers | 454 2.1× followers |
| 1k–10k | 926 35% of followers | 1,091 33.4% of followers | 958 30.6% of followers | 1,090 30.5% of followers | 983 29.3% of followers | 990 29.6% of followers | 1,210 26% of followers | 922 21% of followers |
| 10k–100k | 2,754 9.3% of followers | 3,444 9.4% of followers | 2,717 8.4% of followers | 3,001 8% of followers | 2,978 8% of followers | 2,889 8% of followers | 3,164 8.5% of followers | 2,681 7.3% of followers |
| 100k–1M | 18,831 8.2% of followers | 14,989 6.8% of followers | 14,585 5.3% of followers | 13,134 5.1% of followers | 12,880 4.9% of followers | 13,167 4.2% of followers | 10,824 3.6% of followers | 9,573 2.6% of followers |
| 1M+ | 99,388 4.5% of followers | 108,100 4.6% of followers | 69,887 3% of followers | 66,570 2.7% of followers | 63,388 2.6% of followers | 63,666 2% of followers | 47,699 1.5% of followers | 40,551 1.2% of followers |
The second line under each view count compares views to the account's followers. Anything above 1× followers means a typical video got more views than the account has followers.
What TikTok and Instagram said publicly
Public statements from both platforms during this period.
- November 21, 2024 · InstagramInstagram says it is rebalancing ranking towards accounts people follow, so creators should see unconnected reach go down and connected reach go up. Adam Mosseri on Threads
- January 22, 2026 · TikTokTikTok's US business moves to the new US joint venture, which says it will retrain the recommendation algorithm on US data. Creators report sudden drops in reach; in February TikTok tells NPR no changes have been made. Forbes, January 27, 2026
- May 27, 2026 · InstagramInstagram tells creators to read connected reach (followers) and unconnected reach (recommendations) separately; sends matter most for reaching non-followers. Storyboard18
- October 28, 2026 · Instagram"We try to give every piece of content a chance so a brand new account can get millions of views, which wasn't possible two years ago." Adam Mosseri to Colin and Samir
Questions people ask
Do followers still matter on TikTok and Instagram?
Yes, just much less than most people think. Having 10× more followers gets you about 2.6× the views on TikTok and 4.3× on Instagram—not 10×. A bigger account still gets higher average views than a small account, but a strong hook matters more than follower count.
Why are big accounts getting fewer views?
Platforms now test each new video on a small group of viewers and only push it wider if people watch it through, share it, or save it. A big account with older, less active followers no longer gets automatic views. In our data, TikTok creators with 100k+ followers got 41% fewer views per video in late 2026 than they did in early 2025, and 1M+ creators got 54% fewer.
Why do I see 200k-follower accounts getting the same views as 100-follower accounts?
Because single videos on big accounts can now stall out at a few hundred views if people scroll past them, while a good video on a tiny account can take off. Across a whole month of posts, though, a 100k–1M TikTok account still averages about 9,600 views per video vs. about 450 for an account under 1k (the smaller account beats the bigger one across a full month about 5% of the time).
Is Instagram different from TikTok?
Yes. Followers still count for more on Instagram: 10× more followers gets you about 4.3× the views there, compared to 2.6× on TikTok.
Did the January 2026 US TikTok deal cause the drop in views?
Probably not on its own. The drop in our data started in autumn 2025 (around November 2025)—months before the January 2026 US ownership transfer—and big creators outside the US lost just as many views (−46%) as US creators (−40%).
If you only had today's follower counts, how did you know what creators had in 2025?
We tracked how many new followers each creator gained per 100 new views over a 30-hour window, then worked backwards from today's follower count by subtracting the followers their videos earned along the way. We also tested the data with no adjustment at all, and at half and double that rate—big accounts were down 37% to 46% in every version.
Images to post, repost and embed
Free to use under CC BY 4.0. Keep the credit on the image, and link to yapanddone.com/studies/followers when you can. Feed cards are 4:5 for Instagram and LinkedIn; story cards are 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Stories.
Charts for articles
If followers matter less, what moves views?
Our other studies test what's in the video itself: the hook, and the captions.
What makes a hook actually work? Which caption styles actually work?How we did it
- Creators: every account our niche miner had screened as genuinely in one of 10 niches (career, personal finance, fitness and nutrition, skincare, dating, manifestation and more), at any size: 1,692 on TikTok and 299 on Instagram, from under 100 followers to over 10 million.
- Videos: we collected each creator's posts back to January 2025 (up to about 1,000 per creator on TikTok; on Instagram, where our data access is rationed, their latest 100 or so reels) and counted views on November 7, 2026. Videos under 14 days old, pinned videos and ads were left out.
- Followers at the time: platforms only show today's follower count. We counted each creator's followers and views on November 6 and again about 30 hours later; the followers gained per new view (a median of 0.25 per 100 views on TikTok, 0.2 on Instagram) let us estimate each creator's followers on any past date by subtracting the followers their later views would have brought in. Every headline result is also tested below with no adjustment, half the rate, and double the rate.
- Same-creator comparison: each creator's median video in July–October 2026 against their own median video in January–June 2025, grouped by their followers in early 2025. For 100k+ TikTok creators, the median change was −41% (95% bootstrap range: 36% to 51% fewer; across all 8 sensitivity checks below: 37% to 46% fewer). For creators under 10k, it ranged from −1% to +23% across the checks.
- How much followers matter: for each month, one point per creator (their median video that month) and a regression of log views on log followers at the time, within each niche. The slope gives how many times the views 10× the followers went with; 95% ranges come from resampling creators 200 times. The single month that best splits TikTok's series in two is November 2025 (2.8× before vs. 2.6× after; chosen in 23% of bootstrap resamples, with the decline in the 10× multiplier ranging from 4% to 31% across the sensitivity checks).
Limitations
- Followers at the time of posting are estimated, not observed. The drop in big accounts' views held under every assumption we tried; the exact size of the change in the 10×-followers multiplier is more sensitive to that assumption, so we report all 8 versions in the table below.
- Most small creators were found through a video that was doing well, which flatters the months around it. We left out that video, and checked that results hold when the two months before we found each creator are left out too.
- Creators had to still be posting in late 2026 to be included. Accounts that quit earlier are missing from the 2025 months.
- Older videos have had longer to collect views, though short-form views mostly settle within two weeks.
- This covers English-language talking-head creators in 10 niches. Other formats (music, comedy, meme pages, brands) may behave differently.
- Observational data shows what happened to views at each account size, not which platform tweak caused it.
Sensitivity checks: how the numbers hold up under different assumptions
Because platforms only show today's follower count, we tested 8 versions of the TikTok analysis—including no adjustment to follower counts, half and double the measured follow rate, dropping the two months before we discovered each creator, and splitting US vs. non-US accounts. The drop in big accounts' views shows up in every version.
| Version (TikTok) | Creators | 10× followers, first 6 months | Last 6 months | 100k+ accounts, same creator | Under 10k, same creator |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Main estimate | 1,692 | 2.9× | 2.6× | −41% | +11% |
| Followers today, no back-cast | 1,692 | 4.5× | 3.1× | −37% | −1% |
| Half the measured follow rate | 1,692 | 3.4× | 2.8× | −40% | +6% |
| Double the measured follow rate | 1,692 | 2.5× | 2.4× | −45% | +11% |
| Leave out the 2 months before we found each creator | 1,595 | 2.9× | 2.6× | −40% | +23% |
| Only creators found without one of their videos taking off | 96 | 4.5× | 3.8× | −46% | – |
| US accounts only | 978 | 2.8× | 2.6× | −40% | +9% |
| Accounts outside the US | 714 | 3× | 2.6× | −46% | +11% |
Use it, cite it
The aggregated results are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Journalists, researchers and AI agents can pull the full numbers below; the plain-text summary contains the whole study.
Cite as
Press questions or a custom cut of the data (a niche, a platform, an account size): contact us. We refresh this study each quarter; this page always shows the latest snapshot.