Accounts under 10,000 followers top our virality score in all five categories and post the fewest views

The views column is monotonic in all five categories. Each band up the ladder posts a higher median than the one below it, with no exception in 20 cells.

The size of the step is what differs. In Photo & Video the over-1M median is 84,130 against 19,300 for the under-10,000 band, a factor of 4.4. In Education it is 196,909 against 7,309, a factor of 26.9. Education also holds the largest median follower count of any cell here, at 4,658,032.

The virality column is monotonic in three of the five. In Health & Fitness and Education it falls to a floor at the 100,000-to-1M band and ticks back up above 1M: 17.7 to 20.2 in Health & Fitness, 15.6 to 19.9 in Education.

Virality is Apptonic's own 0-100 score, weighted toward view-to-follower breakout and recency. It measures what is travelling now, not lifetime performance, and it is a ranking signal, not a platform-reported metric.

Half that weight is views divided by followers, with followers floored at 1,000. A video from a 2,422-follower account scores on the ratio it produces. A video from a 2,551,931-follower account is divided by 2,551,931. The under-10,000 band is not beating the over-1M band on this measure so much as being measured on a different denominator.

That is the reason we print two columns and never merge them. The virality column answers whether a post escaped the audience the account already had. The views column answers how many people saw it.

Photo & Video is the one category where the five small posts add up to more, at 96,500 against 84,130. It is also the category with the smallest gap between the bands.

Productivity and Education go the other way by a wide margin. Five under-10,000 posts come to 53,000 and 36,545 median views; one over-1M post returns 194,635 and 196,909.

What this does not price is the difference in what you are buying. A brand account with 3M followers is a different transaction from five accounts with 2,000 followers each, and we hold no rate cards, no brief terms and no usage rights for either.

The account-level sample repeats the video-level virality shape and adds two things the video rows cannot show.

The separation is close to total. 97 of the 100 sampled accounts under 10,000 followers score above 20.5, which is the median for the over-1M band. The highest-scoring over-1M account in the sample reached 30.2, below the under-10,000 band's median of 31.7. A score built on views divided by followers separates by followers, and this is what that looks like at the account level.

The engagement column moves the other way. The over-1M band holds the highest median at 3.28%, above the under-10,000 band's 2.61%. It is the one column here where the largest accounts lead.

Big accounts have taken money from more apps. 45 of the 100 sampled accounts over 1M have promoted more than one app in our library, against 19 of 100 under 10,000. 97 of 100 over 1M are classified as brand accounts, against 57 of 100 under 10,000, so the bands differ in what kind of account they contain and not only in size.

735 of the 877 under-10,000 videos are TikTok posts. 276 of the 472 over-1M videos are Instagram posts. The follower band and the platform move together across the draw.

A TikTok play count and an Instagram view count are two platforms' own counters and they are not comparable to each other. Some part of the view gap between the bands is that difference, and this file cannot tell us how much.

The same shift shows in the account sample. 78 of the 100 sampled accounts under 10,000 followers are TikTok accounts; 56 of the 100 sampled between 100,000 and 1M are Instagram accounts.

The virality column is partly a definition. Half the weight in the score is views divided by followers, with followers floored at 1,000. The under-10,000 band leads that column in all five categories, and the metric was built to make it do so. Nothing here independently confirms that small accounts break out more often.

The bands differ by platform, and view counts do not cross platforms. 735 of the 877 under-10,000 videos are TikTok, against 196 of the 472 over-1M videos. We cannot separate the follower effect from the platform effect in this draw.

The videos were drawn by opening, not at random. These 3,311 rows were sampled as the 100 most recent videos for each of nine video openings in each of five categories. Rare openings are fully included and crowded ones are capped at 100, so the draw over-represents rare openings and the follower mix inherits that. It is not a random sample of the categories.

We cannot report creator concentration for the video bands. The video rows in this file carry a follower count and a platform, and no handle and no app. So we cannot say how many distinct accounts or distinct apps stand behind each band, and a band could lean on a handful of prolific accounts without this page showing it.

Three of the four band populations are unpublishable. The creator counter stops reporting a number above 10,000. The over-1M band holds 4,562 accounts with two or more videos in our library; the other three sit above the cap and we do not know their sizes. The account sample is 100 per band drawn newest-activity-first, which is a draw and not a census.

No outcome is attached to any of these views. We hold no installs per post, no link clicks and no store visits traced back to a video. A higher median view count is a higher median view count. Content is linked to apps by store links where we can find them and by name matching otherwise. Name matching is deliberately generous and it is not perfect. These figures describe Apptonic's own library as of 14 August 2026. The library is a growing sample of the app market, not a census.