I wrote last week about the insanity of not knowing the most viewed videos on TikTok — basic data which would tell us about the information entire

How to hunt down TikTok's top videos - by Louis Barclay

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2024-02-13 18:00:03

I wrote last week about the insanity of not knowing the most viewed videos on TikTok — basic data which would tell us about the information entire societies are consuming via the platform.

These videos are hiding in plain sight. Each has been viewed by hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of people. But it’s impossible to get a simple list of them.

In that last post, I promised to write a follow up about how I might hunt these videos down, so here are all the methods I can think of, along with what each method tells us about the internet in 2024.

Coming up: I’ll attempt one of these Methods to get the TikTok most viewed data, and break down how it went. Subscribe here:

This seems like an obvious place to start. Searching for ‘most viewed TikTok videos’ and related terms brings up two things:

A bunch of articles listing most watched TikTok videos (usually around 10 of them). These do shed a little light on the very top of the pyramid, which is useful — although it’s hard to know whether this is comprehensive (i.e. includes all content types, not just entertainment).