I’m a top 5% filter creator on TikTok

I was messing around with TikTok Effect House, the app for creating filters for its platform.

As I was just learning, the filter I created was super simple. I just combined the aging filter along with the wink filter. We can never explain why things go viral. Often it is just the right place and right time. There are a ton of aging filters out there.

I think why this might have caught on was because of the name I chose, “Future Self”. Future self is a story telling mechanism, where your future self comes back in time to present day to tell you something like “don’t dye your hair, you’re going to end up looking horrible like me!”

Who wouldn’t want to see your future self travel back in time and wink at yourself?

I didn’t think much of this filter after creating this. But after a week, this came up on the analytics page:

Top 10% of effects. This is pretty incredible given that TikTok is a huge platform.

What’s more incredible is that I’m in the top 5% of effect creators.

From a math / stats perspective, what does this mean? It means TikTok probably has a lot of creators. But the majority of creators have made filters that is used very few times. Hence at 27k views and 195 posts, it is in the top 10%. There are maybe even more creators that have not even created any filters, so I end up being in the top 5% of creators?

This also suggests that there is a very long tail. Some filters are super successful and used by millions of creators. These would be in the 1% or 0.1%.

Pretty interesting.