Jessica Ryan

But its five-second intro, a post-toke cough followed by a throaty scream, had popped up in a few TikToks of MMA fighters pummeling each other and weightlifters grunting beneath squat bars. Experience had taught 25/7 Media that when brief “recreates” of these kinds of songs burble up in those particular TikTok communities, virality can soon follow. When the number of recreates climbs into the tens or hundreds of thousands, Magana told me, two of 25/7’s core tenets become germane. The first: Once a social media user hears an audio snippet nine times, it gets stuck in their head to some degree. The second, which Magana has dubbed the Ten Percent Rule, is that 10 percent of those earwormed users will end up tracking down the snippet’s original source. 

Rather than pay one or two famous influencers to use the “Toxic” intro in the hopes of producing a trickle-down effect, the firm appealed to scores of MMA and weightlifting TikTokkers whose followings rarely top more than a few hundred. (Some were given small payments to push the song, but others were happy to do it for free.) Flooding the zone this way caused TikTok’s algorithm to funnel posts featuring “Toxic” into the feeds of users who consume gym-centric content. Inevitably, some of those users were creators themselves, and they began to weave YoungX777’s clip into videos targeting related subcultures—like the region of TikTok obsessed with highlights of soccer players bursting past hapless defenders.

The biggest startup opportunities often live in the grey. Bill Gurley calls it regulatory friction — rules built to protect incumbents, not consumers…Uber and Airbnb played in the grey — breaking laws around safety and licensing, but creating so much consumer love that regulation eventually bent to them. Now we’re seeing similar patterns in:

Short-form is critical for building audience, but long-form is critical for building engagement.  In the context of today’s revenue share formulas and sponsorship models, high-quality fan engagement will be the key to long-term success as the industry continues to evolve.

“In the entertainment industry, the various genres tend to live in separate and isolated ecosystems,” Isaacs said in a statement. “As a producer and builder of worlds, I’m interested in bringing people together. The artists we work with refuse to limit their vision to any one sector, and Octoverse Media will be there to support them regardless of genre.”

Unified Video Strategy and Ad Revenue analytics