Types of TikTok videos ranked: walls of text and 7 other formats

Method

Data

• 1,272 public short videos: 1,120 from TikTok and 152 from Instagram. Collected in early October 2026.
• Four niches: local professional services (302 videos), relocation and immigration (342), consumer brands (317) and software apps (311).
• Account types: business owners posting as themselves (849 videos), official brand accounts (96), brand UGC accounts (40) and creators (287).
• Headline figures use the 985 videos from 111 business accounts. Creator videos are excluded. The all-accounts figures are shown below as a check.

Sampling

• Accounts needed at least 10 eligible videos: not ads, at least 7 days old, 3 minutes or shorter.
• Accounts were drawn in a fixed pseudo-random order (an MD5 hash of the handle) up to a quota per niche.
• For each account we took the median views of all its eligible videos. We then sampled eight of them: the three most-viewed, the three least-viewed, and the videos at the one-third and two-thirds ranks.
• So about half of all sampled videos sit above their account's median by design. The comparison asks which formats turn up among an account's hits, and which among its misses.

Measure

• Relative views = a video's views divided by its account's median views. 1.0x means a typical video for that account.
• Format score = the median relative views of the videos in that format.
• Beat the median = the share of videos in a format with relative views above 1.0x.
• Saves per 100 likes = the median of saves divided by likes, times 100.

Format definitions

A vision model labelled eight frames per video for shot type, text style, talking, on-screen words and cuts. Transcripts and captions were added. Formats are rules over those labels. They can overlap, so a video can count in more than one.

Uncertainty

• 95% intervals come from a bootstrap that resamples accounts (4,000 draws), because videos from one account aren't independent.
• Most intervals are wide and overlap. Read the ranking as directional.
• This is an observational comparison. It shows correlation, not causation. Accounts that pick a format may differ in other ways.

Full results (business accounts)

Download: format-summary.csv

Walls of text, split

The reveal structure (a short hook alone, then the list) was almost absent from the sample. Only 3 of 60 walls matched our proxy, too few to test. Evidence for the reveal comes from individual high-view examples (below), not from this dataset.

Who posts walls of text (business accounts, this sample)

Shares describe the eight-per-account sample, not all posting by these accounts.

Checks

Walls of text and green screens stay at the bottom with creators included, and on TikTok alone. Only 3 of the 60 business walls are from Instagram, so the wall finding is essentially a TikTok finding.

A second cut. A within-account comparison across 840 TikTok business videos from 105 accounts found that videos with more than 40 words on screen earned 0.78x the views of the same accounts' other videos (geometric mean; 95% interval 0.57x-1.08x; not statistically conclusive). On Instagram (152 videos from 20 accounts, all account types), the same split went the other way, at 1.21x (0.67x-2.26x).

Examples at the top of each format

These come from a separate review of 74 high-view TikTok posts (read 4 October 2026) and 80 saved Instagram posts. They were chosen for illustration and are top-of-niche winners, not a sample. Creator accounts aren't named.

Among the high-view list and itinerary montages we reviewed, saves ran at 25% to 110% of likes. Of the nine high-view green screens reviewed, six reacted to news or a viral clip.