🔴 How to get 1 billion short-form views

Can you make a living making posting just a few TikToks and Instagram Reels per year? If you’re Grant Beene, whose short-form videos recently crossed 1 billion total views … yes.

In this episode:

— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor

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By Francis Zierer

Grant Beene does not have a “day job.” He’s all-in on his craft as a short-form video creator. When he first moved from Texas to LA in 2022, he told me, he was one of 10 guys living in one four-bedroom house. With no job lined up, it was all he could afford.

He’d been in LA for nearly a year and was running out of cash when he landed his first brand deal, with Spin Master Games. At that point, he was well into the absurd, group-sketch style he’s now known for, and the brand activation worked in seamlessly.

Any mention of a brand feels natural in the absurd world of Grant’s videos — the rapid context shifts allow him to fit in a brand deal without compromising the creative vision.

Since that first deal, Grant has worked with brands like Axe, Totino’s, and DoorDash. Though he now has representation, for the first couple of years, he negotiated brand deals himself. He has a list of demands any brand interested in working with him must submit.

At his rates and with his lifestyle, he says, he only needs “two, three brand deals a year.” This allows him to reject any poor fit.

The first video I noticed from Grant, which prompted me to follow him, was a sponsored video featuring Totino’s Pizza Rolls. It has 10.1 million views on TikTok and 61.3 million on Instagram; he declined to tell me how much the brand paid for the privilege, but whatever the rate was, I’d bet that much they were happy with the performance.

For Grant, it’s a rate that pays him enough to spend two months working on each new video, sponsored or not. Only two of his six TikTok uploads last year were sponsored.

Grant posted a grand total of six TikToks in 2025. They received a combined 113.5 million views.

Though his content is native to TikTok, it’s doing even better on Instagram. Of those six videos from 2025, Grant uploaded four to Reels — for a combined 184.2 million views, or 46 million average views.

Demand for his content is only increasing. His most-viewed video to date is his most recent (October 22, 2025), with 64.9 million views on Instagram and 45.5 million on TikTok:

The majority of Grant’s views have come since May 2022, when he moved to LA, started writing more complex sketches, shooting exclusively at night, and working with a writing partner.

Since then (as of February 2026):

As of this writing, Grant has a total, all-time view count of just over 1 billion.

Grant’s videos are the ultimate form of a very specific style of video skit comedy: lo-fi, short-form, feed-native, Gen Z, American. Evolving from Snapchat, through Vine, to TikTok — though the videos may command more attention on Instagram Reels these days, they are decidedly a product of TikTok’s tools and limitations.

In an unending short-form video feed, every moment of video must earn the viewer’s attention for the next moment. Grant’s style was formed by this rule.

As one Instagram commenter put it, “I feel like I watched five reels without having to scroll.”

By the time Vine shut down in 2017, Grant’s account had around 30,000 followers. He’d developed a video style where two characters — both played by him — would have a “comedic conversation.” Not long after downloading TikTok in 2019, he started making and posting videos in the same style.

His videos hit from the start, all garnering hundreds of thousands of views; six posts and barely one week in, he had his first million-view hit.

Just over one year after downloading TikTok, Grant moved from Texas to Utah to live in a content house with some of his friends. “[Creator] houses were so big at the time,” he told me, and the crew was working with management, trying to become a proper group.

The Utah creator house nearly soured Grant on content creation.

When he eventually landed his first sponsor, however, it came from a connection he’d made in Utah.

Before and during his experience at the creator house in Utah, Grant filmed and posted videos at a rapid clip. Ever since returning to video creation after that experience, he’s focused on quality over quantity — and his following and views have skyrocketed.

Here’s how many videos (divided by year) are currently live on Grant’s TikTok:

The first video in the style Grant still works in today was published on May 9, 2022. The key traits of this style, evident in every video since, are:

Grant says this video was still in Version 1 of his style (and everything previously was essentially a different product).

He moved on to Version 2 on February 8, 2024, with a video he calls “Golf.” The TikTok video has 28.1 million views at the time of writing. The top comment, with 99.1k likes, says “Just explained interstellar in 30 seconds.”

The videos Grant is currently working on mark the transition to V3. The rules are changing. For previous versions, he wanted the videos to look easy to make:

For V3, one change they’re making is the level of props. For one video, they rented an ice-cream truck; in the past, they would’ve rented a U-Haul and just printed out pictures of ice cream to tape to it.

Since May 2022, every one of Grant’s videos has featured at least one other person. There are a few consistent collaborators and more one-off guests, but the ever-present thread is Jericho Mencke.

The two friends met before Grant’s time in Utah and moved there together, where they began to develop a common understanding. They’ve worked as a duo since Grant moved to LA, and their followings have grown together:

At any given point, Grant says, they’ll be writing two scripts, one for each of them. “The way a writing session will work is we'll write for me for like an hour and a half, and him for an hour and a half — we'll oscillate.”

Once the script is written, the person whose video it is will handle production — shot list, props, casting. Grant says there are three friends who tend to work with them as actors nowadays.

Outside of their short-form work, the pair wrote a pilot episode for a 20-minute show.

While Grant’s aim is to go into film, to be a writer-director, he says Jericho’s goal is to direct commercials for a living.

As of this writing, Grant hasn't posted in nearly four months — but Jericho has uploaded twice in that time, with both videos featuring Grant.

Grant has mastered his craft as a creator of short-form sketch comedy videos. The question is how he’ll translate these sensibilities into 3-minute videos, into episodic content, and beyond.

That show pilot took them a year to write. It was not picked up. Reflecting on the process, Grant told me he learned that, in longer formats, the writing “can't just be random to be random. It needs to be organized chaos.”

This is what’s at play whenever one of Grant’s videos starts with the Snapchat-style white text on a full-screen-width grey bar. It’s telling you that this was funny enough on Snapchat for someone to port it over to Instagram or TikTok — and that it’ll be short.

Suddenly, 10 seconds later, you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of a @grantbeans video.

He’s far from the only person doing this. Just the other day, I saw a Snapchat-style clip of somebody slipping on ice, filmed from across the street, which transitioned into a music video featuring the person who’d fallen.

Tempt the viewer with the sugar-high payoff of a familiar format. Tailor it to your project and trace an elegant transition.