Estimating the view count distribution on TikTok

TikTok is unusual in that the views of video get are fairly unpredictable. Unlike other social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, most views through TikTok are driven by a recommendation algorithm (rather than who you follow) so views can vary dramatically based on unpredictable nuances of the algorithm. Within the same week, I've had videos whose success differs by a factor of 10,000. I want to get some sense of how likely my next video is to be successful. Merely looking at the average of my most recent videos is not very predictive, because of how random the view counts are. This post details a method for creating these predictions, as well as a calculator so that you can protect your own future success. Methodology The view counts that videos get on TikTok are reasonably well approximated by a gamma distribution: (Note that the x-axis is logged.) This gives us a reasonable prior to use for a Bayesian update . Recalling that the conjugat...