🔴 The science of short-form video

You can learn much about why a creator’s content performs by scanning through their archive for inflection points.

It’s a key part of my research for any given interview. Today, I walk through what I learned preparing for Tuesday’s interview with Kallaway.

— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor

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By Francis Zierer

Short-form video, at least as much as any other digital media format, is a system to be gamed.

You start making videos, publish them. Note the performance; identify the point where your skills and interests intersect with the prevailing platform meta (on TikTok, Instagram, or Shorts) to attract views.

Kane Kallaway, who I interviewed for Tuesday’s issue, nailed this approach.

In his first seven months and 123 videos posting on TikTok, he climbed to 88,000 followers. At that point (April 2023), having nailed aspects of his style that he still leans on today, he went on a 92-video run across a six-month period, hammering precisely that style.

It earned him 133,000 followers, his greatest by-percentage growth period since.

His is a systematic approach — I was not surprised when, checking his LinkedIn, I saw he’d worked in management consulting for seven years. This is how he describes the most performant short-form video creators:

One of the first things I do in researching for a podcast interview is find the guest’s oldest relevant content. I scroll through and look for inflection points where the visual style or view count suddenly changed.

I did this with Kallaway — it’s quite clear when and why he started gaining momentum.

To be clear, I did not watch every single one of these videos. We’re just looking at the thumbnails here, which include the first frame of each video. Story, audio, editing — these factors are obviously hugely important, but Kallaway’s thumbnail development still tells us a great deal.

Here are three of his oldest and least-viewed posts (from September 2022):

Notice, purely at the thumbnail level:

There’s a lack of polish. This is before you play the video, before you analyze audio, narrative structure, or editing style.

Compare with three of his newest posts (from December 2025 and January 2026):

Notice, still at the thumbnail level:

So, those are the two extremes. If you go in and watch a few of these videos to compare, the number of details comprising the difference is overwhelming (audio quality, video topics, narrative structure, etc.). It’s a little less overwhelming if we zoom out and look for inflection points between now and then.

By February 2023, just four months after those first uploads, Kallaway hit 100 videos published and used the horizontal-split thumbnail style for the first time.

By March 2023, just a few weeks later, he’s almost exclusively creating videos with this visual format … and frequently hitting millions of views.

Just days after the above run of videos, on April 3, 2023, for what will be the last time in 6 months, he posts a video without his face in the thumbnail, without the split-screen format. Today, it has just over 6,000 views. Flop.

He then goes on a 92-video run in which every single thumbnail uses that format. Most of those 92 videos have tens or hundreds of thousands of views. 23 have at least 1 million views. The most popular video from that period has 11.8 million views.

According to data from social media tracking service SocialBlade, at the start of that period, he had 82,000 TikTok followers. By the time he posted his next video without the horizontal split thumbnail format, he had around 215,000.

Today, over two years later, he’s at 400k and hasn't had a larger percentage growth period since that 92-video run.

TikTok’s algorithm and what audiences want from their content have changed since 2023, but Kallaway’s videos still hit enviable numbers; his last video to cross the million mark was posted on December 23, 2025; just over three weeks later, it has 7 million views.

Find what works. Hammer it as long as possible. Run the opportunity until the algorithm and meta shift beneath your feet.

The takeaway here, however, is not to go study Kallaway’s most-viewed videos, break down every minute production detail, and use those details as a checklist to produce your own content.

It’s to do that with a variety of high-performing videos from a variety of creators across a variety of topic areas.

Nailing every component at once, from the beginning, alone isn’t possible. Kallaway took years to develop the level of polish he has today — the goal should be to try to nail one new component every few rounds.

The reality is, no matter how hard you try to duplicate Kallaway’s videos — hire the same production partners he works with, light and decorate your studio exactly like his, or adopt his manner of speaking — you won’t get the same result. But in the process, in your attempt to create a duplicate, you will create something original to you.

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