It's a seemingly simple question with a seemingly obvious answer. If you've read anything about TikTok, you probably assume that most Americans are watching influencers who talk about politics, fashion, weight loss, and a broad, amorphous category of behaviors called "trends." Those who write about TikTok - not just journalists but academic researchers - tend to write about what they're interested in, what has the biggest impact on society or the economy, or what is trending. What is trending on any large platform like YouTube or TikTok represents less than 5% of what users are watching, so it's not a good starting point for answering this question.
Instead, it's better to start with a representative sample of Americans and ask them to report URLS of the last ten TikTok videos they watched, which is what we did in April of 2024. Why ten? People tend to get tired of copying and pasting URLs after that, and we believe this allows us a view of most Americans' TikTok viewing habits that other approaches do not offer.
After collecting roughly 3,000 URLs from roughly 300 Americans, we watched each video and categorized it based on its topic. Topics ranged from music and dance to true crime to news, politics, and social issues. Recognizing that many videos were "about" multiple things (a comedy skit that was about animals and relationships), we assigned as many topic labels to these videos as was warranted. We then calculated the share of videos in our sample that belonged to each topic category. Here is what we found.
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It is hard to characterize Americans' TikTok viewing in terms of topic. It may be tempting to look at the highest bars in the chart and talk about how TikTok is mostly a light-hearted platform where Americans watched comedy and dance videos, but those two categories, cumulatively, account for less than half of the videos in our sample. Another way to describe the viewing is "fragmented," which is misleading and oversimplifying in its own way. To get a better understanding of what types of content Americans watched on TikTok, it helps to have a point of comparison.
We also asked our representative sample of Americans to provide the URLs of the last ten YouTube videos they watched. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the two platforms.
Relative to YouTube, TikTok was used by Americans to view more comedy content and content about relationships while YouTube was used more for educational videos (e.g., tutorials) and clips from movies and TV shows. But the diversity of topics is broad on both platforms: not only can you find content on a wide variety of topics on both platforms; Americans tended to watch a variety of content. Based on this admittedly rudimentary analysis, it's best to think of cross-platform differences in Americans' short video diets (and perhaps, by extension, the identities and purposes of the platforms) as tendencies rather than in absolute terms.
