State of the Feed
At the end of Wrapped for TikTok, people can donate an anonymized copy of their TikTok data for research. 16,981 people did. These are the first results.
The panel
- 16,981
- donors from 83 countries
- 464M
- video views
- 335 years
- of combined feed time
Donations came in two waves, in December 2024 and from March to July 2026. The largest groups are from Brazil, the United States and Singapore. The panel contains 568 million events and 132 million distinct videos. The report was generated in July 2026.
Two years, one direction
Donors from 2026 swipe faster, watch newer videos and scroll more often and later at night than donors from 2024. The two waves are different people, so these are changes in the panel, not in individuals.
Key findings
A 9-second audition
The median video is watched for 9 seconds before a swipe. 26% are dismissed within 3 seconds, and only 12% hold attention for more than a minute. Half of all videos are gone by the 10-second mark.
The feed has no memory
Half of everything watched was less than 9 days old, and 19% was less than a day old. Only 5% of views went to videos older than a year. Hit videos collect most of their views within two weeks.
The world scrolls on one clock
Adjusted to each person’s local time, watching peaks at 8 pm and is lowest at 4 am. 11% of all watching happens between midnight and 6 am, and 27% of people have their busiest hour between 10 pm and 4 am.
“One more video”
The median session is 30 videos or 20 minutes. Sessions longer than an hour are only 20% of sessions, but they account for 60% of all watch time.
Most videos get no reaction
For every 1,000 videos watched there are 88 likes, 14 shares and 3 comments. 91% of videos are watched without a like. Likes received are concentrated: the top 1% of panelists receive 75% of all likes.
A feed of one
71% of all distinct videos were seen by exactly one person in the panel, and together they make up 23% of all views. The single most-watched video reached 29% of panelists.
Sharing is private
Of 7.5 million shares, nine in ten go to one person in a TikTok direct message. Only 0.8% are shared to a story.
Method and privacy
- Consent: donating is optional and happens after people have seen their Wrapped. Donors confirm they are over 18 and receive a code to withdraw their data later.
- Anonymization in the browser: before anything is sent, comments, searches, locations, device IDs and profile details are removed. Only an allowlist of fields is kept.
- Anonymization on the server: usernames are replaced with keyed hashes that change with every dataset release, and countries with fewer than five donors are suppressed.
- Aggregates only: the report publishes no individual data. Monthly statistics require at least 50 contributing panelists.
- Inferred watch time: TikTok exports record when a video started, not how long it played. Gaps of up to five minutes to the next video count as watch time.
- Not representative: the panel consists of people curious about their own screen time and skews toward Wrapped’s largest audiences.
What comes next
A full paper describing the dataset is in preparation together with academic researchers. It will cover a newer release with more than 17,000 donations and 580 million records, including viewing history going back to 2022. Unlike most TikTok datasets, which are scraped from public content, this one shows the viewer’s side of the platform.
The dataset is available for non-commercial scientific research under a data usage agreement. Researchers can ask for access at [email protected]. To add your own data, create your Wrapped for TikTok and choose to donate at the end.