Articles
What the numbers say about app growth.
Every article here is counted from our own dataset, states the window it covers, and shows how it was counted.
- Medical is the only app category of 17 where Instagram holds more of the videos than TikTokInstagram's share of matched app videos runs from 55.8% in Medical to 21.4% in Personalization, across 84,970 videos in 17 categories, on 14 August 2026.
- How long app videos run: 30 seconds for a promo, 82 for a listicleWe timed 1,100 videos, 100 in each of 11 formats. The median promo runs 30 seconds and the median listicle 82, and the middle 80% of promos runs anywhere from 7 seconds to 99.
- 197,558 of the 419,998 app videos we classified carry no call to actionThat is 47.0% of the posts our classifier read, not 47.0% of app videos. A test we ran on our own pipeline says the real share is lower.
- The most-used video opening in five app categories has the top median views in one of themCuriosity-gap hooks are 35.8% to 55.6% of the classified videos in these categories. They lead median views in Education and rank fifth of six in Productivity, at 18,650 against 47,074.
- We went looking for 9,802 apps' Meta advertiser pages. We found ads for 3,996.We tried to resolve a Meta advertiser page for 9,802 apps. 3,996 hold an ad, and 1,763 pages matched an app but were running nothing.
- 231,885 of the Meta ads we hold started in the last 180 daysThat is about 94% of the 245,937 ads in our library, though the two figures come from counters built differently. Part of the recency is the market and part may be our own collection, and this snapshot cannot separate them.
- How to Research a Competitor's App Marketing StrategyA repeatable seven-phase method for reverse-engineering a competitor app's positioning, creative, channel mix, creator footprint and monetisation.
- Finding the TikTok Creators Behind an App's GrowthHow to identify which TikTok creators are actually driving installs for an app, using manual search techniques and structured creator data.
- How to Track Competitor App Ads on Meta and TikTokWhat Meta Ad Library and TikTok Creative Center actually show, what they miss, and the one signal that predicts whether a competitor's ad is working.
- How to Find UGC Creators for Your AppWhy follower count is the wrong filter for app UGC, the two signals that actually predict performance, and how to pitch and pay creators.