Getting a way of the size of social media platforms will be tough. Whereas tech corporations typically share self-serving metrics—like month-to-month energetic customers or how seemingly customers are to purchase merchandise after partaking with manufacturers—they hardly ever supply a real sense of their platforms’ enormity.
However a new study revealed in Cornell College’s preprint server arXiv goals to vary that by quantifying TikTok’s scale over a single day—claiming to be among the many first to know the platform’s full scope. It additionally provides perception into what individuals are watching, how a lot content material is being uploaded, and who’s posting it.
“The motivation is utilizing this social media information to higher perceive society,” says Jürgen Pfeffer, one of many research’s coauthors and chair of computational science on the Technical College of Munich. The researchers reverse-engineered how TikTok assigns video IDs to collect their information, finally capturing what they imagine to be a minimum of 99% of all posts from a single hour on April 10, 2024—round 5 million movies. In addition they sampled one minute from each hour throughout a 24-hour span between April 9 and 10. The complete course of took 5 months.
Among the many staff’s findings was the sheer scale of TikTok exercise. They estimated 117 million movies have been uploaded on that single day. Roughly one in 5 featured youngsters, primarily based on estimates from an age classification engine the staff skilled. Movies posted exactly on the 0th second of every minute considerably outperformed others—suggesting timing methods would possibly affect the algorithm. Nonetheless, Pfeffer notes this might be on account of skilled creators scheduling their posts, who’re additionally extra prone to obtain success.
A few fifth of the movies have been deleted inside seven months, hinting at large-scale moderation or person remorse.
The typical video was roughly 20.5 seconds lengthy and was considered between 2,250 and a pair of,500 occasions—relying on whether or not the information got here from the hour-long slice or the one-minute-per-hour pattern.
Pfeffer was additionally stunned to seek out that TikTok engagement peaked twice each day. Round 4 a.m. UTC (11 p.m. EST), uploads surged to just about six million movies per hour, reaching the same peak once more round 1 p.m. UTC (8 a.m. EST). The researchers attributed these spikes to international utilization cycles, as morning customers in Asia overlapped with late-night uploaders within the U.S., and vice versa later within the day.
The staff additionally grouped well-liked movies into thematic clusters. Among the many commonest have been “pictures with colourful backgrounds and graphics” and “selfies with modern outfits and watermarks.” Much less frequent themes included “political commentary on police operations in Pakistan” (0.025% of all movies) and “camouflaged navy soldier pictures,” which accounted for 0.06% of the content material.
