Wrapped for TikTok · Research
"Wrapped for TikTok" gives people a personal recap of their time on TikTok. At the end, users can choose to donate their scrolling data to science. 16,981 people shared their data, and this report is what we learned from it.
Each of them donated their complete, anonymized TikTok data export to our research program: 568 million logged events from 83 countries, some reaching back to 2015.
464,272,908
videos watched between them —
2.9 million
hours of feed time, about
335
years
16,981 consent-based donationsfully anonymizedaggregates only, no individualsmethodology at the end
01 · 2024 → 2026
Two years, one direction
Two waves of donations, eighteen months apart, measured with the same instruments. Before we go deeper, the headline: everything about how we watch moved the same way — faster, fresher, more often, later into the night, and on more days of the year.
The swipe · 2024 → 2026
40% less patience per video
Videos dismissed within three seconds: 23% → 33%.
The culture cycle · 2024 → 2026
Content is 41% younger
Watching that is less than a day old: 17% → 24%. A shared reference now expires in days, not weeks.
The sitting · 2024 → 2026
21% more sittings — and longer ones
The median sitting grew too: 19 min → 26 min. Consumption is rising from both ends at once.
The night · 2024 → 2026
The day's last scroll ends 60 minutes later
Days whose scrolling runs past midnight: 30% → 36%.
The habit · 2024 → 2026
The feed claims 24 more days a year
one dot = one daya full year
Days with any scrolling at all: 84% → 90% of the year. A day without the feed is now the exception — about 7 in 10 panelists have held an unbroken 30-day streak.
All readings · 2024 → 2026
Every needle, one direction
Late-2024 panel2026 panel
Median time before a video is swiped away
10s6s−40%
Videos dismissed within 3 seconds
23%33%+10 pp
Median age of a video when watched
9.4d5.5d−41%
Watching that is less than a day old
17%24%+7 pp
Hit video's views arriving in its first 14 days
64%68%+4 pp
Sessions per active day
3.9×4.7×+21%
Median session length
19 min26 min+33%
Median end of the day's last scroll
10:00 pm11:00 pm+60 min
Days whose scrolling ends past midnight
30%36%+7 pp
Days a year that include the feed at all
305d329d+24 days
Bars are drawn to each metric's full scale. Two different panels, measured identically from their watch history — panel-to-panel, not within-person.
02 · Attention
The 9-second audition
Every video gets a heartbeat to prove itself before a thumb passes judgement. Across 464 million views, the verdict is remarkably consistent — and remarkably fast. Scroll on to watch a minute of feed time play out.
A video starts playing…
0.0s
0%of viewers swiped away
Keep scrolling to watch a minute tick by — and the panel's verdicts come in.
How long a video holds us
under 1s
6%
1–2s
13%
2–3s
8%
3–5s
10%
5–8s
10%
8–15s
16%
15–30s
15%
30–60s
11%
over 60s
12%
The swipe is getting faster
Late-2024 panel
median swipe ·
23%
of videos gone within 3s
2026 panel
median swipe ·
33%
of videos gone within 3s
The two waves are different people, so this is a panel-to-panel comparison, not a within-person change — see methodology.
03 · Culture
The feed has no memory
The feed lives in an eternal present. Half of everything watched was less than 9 days old — and the past barely exists.
8.1 days
the median video's age at the moment it crossed someone's screen
19%
of everything watched was uploaded within the previous 24 hours
5%
was older than a year — the archive barely exists
How old the feed is
under 1 hour
3%
1–24 hours
16%
1–7 days
29%
1–4 weeks
21%
1–12 months
26%
over a year
5%
Late-2024 panel
9.4 days
median content age · 17% fresh within 24h
2026 panel
5.5 days
median content age · 24% fresh within 24h
Different people in each wave — a panel-to-panel comparison, not a within-person change. Both are measured identically from watch history.
Trends burn faster
Hits of 2024
64%
of a hit's views arrive in its first 14 days ·
1.6M
videos
Hits of 2026
68%
of a hit's views arrive in its first 14 days ·
349K
videos
04 · Rhythm
The world scrolls on one clock
Aligned to each person's own local time, the panel's 83 countries collapse into a single daily heartbeat: quiet at 4 am, building all day, peaking after dinner — and never actually stopping.
11%
of all watching happens between midnight and 6 am — the feed never really sleeps
27%
of people have their single busiest hour between 10 pm and 4 am
Watching climbs all day and peaks at 8 pm. The quietest moment of the feed's day is 4 am.
A week on the feed
12am
6am
12pm
6pm
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
The day ends later now
Late-2024 panel
10:00 pm
median last scroll · 30% of days end past midnight
2026 panel
11:00 pm
median last scroll · 36% of days end past midnight
Deep-night watching (midnight–3 am): 9% of the late-2024 panel's watching vs 8% for the 2026 panel.
05 · Sessions
“One more video”
The feed is consumed in sittings. Most are a coffee-break long — but the outliers do the heavy lifting: the 20% of sessions that run past an hour swallow 60% of all time spent watching.
30
videos in the median session
20 min
length of the median session
3.9
sessions on a typical active day
3.8 h
the 99th-percentile session
How long a sitting lasts
under 5 min
24%
5–15 min
19%
15–30 min
18%
30–60 min
20%
1–2 h
14%
over 2 h
6%
Where the time actually goes
Sessions over an hour make up
20%
of sessions
Sessions over an hour make up
60%
of all feed time
More often — and longer
Late-2024 panel
3.9×
sessions per active day · median 19 min · 15% under 2 min
2026 panel
4.7×
sessions per active day · median 26 min · 14% under 2 min
A daily habit, measured
Late-2024 panel
84%
of days on the feed · 74% kept a 30-day streak
2026 panel
90%
of days on the feed · 70% kept a 30-day streak
06 · Engagement
Mostly, we just watch
The like button tells a quieter story than the culture around it suggests. For the overwhelming majority of videos, the only trace a viewer leaves is the swipe itself — and the reactions that do exist pool around astonishingly few people.
Out of every 1,000 videos watched…
liked88 in 1,000 · 8.8%
shared14 in 1,000 · 1.4%
favorited7 in 1,000 · 0.7%
watched live5 in 1,000 · 0.5%
commented on3 in 1,000 · 0.3%
led to a follow3 in 1,000 · 0.3%
91%
of videos are watched without so much as a like
17 chars
median length of a comment — about three or four words
34%
of comments are 10 characters or fewer — emoji and one-word reactions
Where the likes land
75%
of all likes received go to the top 1% of panelists
26
likes received by the median panelist — in their entire time on TikTok
34%
have never received a single like
07 · Sharing
Sharing is whispering
When something is good enough to pass on, it almost never goes on a story or a wall. It goes to one specific person, in a private chat — 90% of the time without ever leaving TikTok.
90%
of all shares go straight into TikTok's own DMs
7.5M
shares observed across the panel
0.8%
end up on a public story — WhatsApp status, Instagram or Snapchat stories combined
Where a shared video goes
TikTok DMs
90.1%
Copied link
4.0%
2.5%
Other
1.3%
Messenger & SMS
0.8%
0.4%
Telegram
0.4%
Snapchat
0.3%
Discord
0.1%
08 · The algorithm
A feed of one
We talk about TikTok as shared culture, but the data shows the opposite: personalization is so deep that most of what you saw this year, statistically, no one else in a 16,981-person panel saw at all.
seen by one person onlyseen by two or more
71%
of all videos in the dataset were seen by exactly one panelist — nobody else's feed ever showed them
Of the 132M distinct videos the panel encountered, the overwhelming majority appeared in a single person's feed and no one else's. The dimmed cells on the left are that private majority; the lit cells are the shared culture.
Few videos, most of the views
share of all videosshare of all views
seen by
1
person
seen by
2
seen by
3–5
seen by
6–20
seen by
21–100
seen by
100+
29%
of the panel saw the single most widely-seen video — even the biggest hit missed most feeds
11%
of all watches are rewatches of a video that person had seen before
2.5M
times someone returned to the same video at least five times
But the shared sliver is global
1 country
1%
2–4 countries
24%
5–9 countries
17%
10+ countries
58%
The median hit spread across 12 countries, with its single biggest country holding only 41% of its audience.
09 · Methodology
How to read this
Everything above is computed from voluntarily donated, anonymized TikTok data exports. Here is exactly where the numbers come from — and where their limits are.
Watch-history coverage by month
Who is in the panel
16,981 people who used Wrapped for TikTok and explicitly donated their anonymized TikTok data export for research. The panel skews toward our largest audiences (BR, US, SG) and toward people curious about their own screen time — it is not a representative sample of TikTok.
Watch time is inferred
TikTok exports record when each video started, not how long it played. We measure the gap to the next video start and treat gaps up to five minutes as watch time; longer gaps end a session. True watch time can differ when a video is left running.
Two donation waves
Most data arrived in two waves: December 2024 and March–July 2026. Any comparison across the waves compares different people, and every export only reaches as far back as TikTok's own retention for each data category. Where that matters, the report says so on the chart.
Local time is inferred
Exports carry UTC timestamps. Each panelist's timezone is estimated from all data in their dataset.
Only aggregates are published
Every number on this page is an aggregate over thousands of people. No individual viewing histories, videos, creators or sounds are identified, and monthly statistics require at least 50 contributing panelists.
The numbers
568,385,037 events, of which 464,272,908 are video views, spanning 2015-06-25 to 2026-07-16. Dataset release e317db0d, report generated 2026-07-30.
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The dataset is available for scientific research only — commercial applications are not permitted. Access is granted exclusively under a data usage agreement that restricts misuse, and everything in it is anonymized and donated with explicit consent.
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