A Creed fan edit by editor “Areq” reportedly lifted the 10-year-old film’s viewership by 29% and put it back in Netflix’s Top 10, a decade after its release.
An edit by Minecraftice on JVKE’s “Her” passed 43M views, pushed hundreds of other creators in the community to post their own versions, and drove millions of streams to the song.
This is what is commonly known as a fan edit, in which fans of a particular celebrity or media franchise take existing source material—excerpts from films, TV shows, video games, concert performances, paparazzi reels—and modify it to create something new.
Their edits are like bat signals to other members of their community, whose eager engagement encourages the TikTok algorithm to continue promoting these videos.
This is especially true for anime, TV and sports communities, which have a long history of creating and consuming fan-made content, including music videos. “These fans tend to cluster together, and that’s a big reason why the edits are more successful,” says Sanskar, Head of Marketing at Lkay Media, the biggest company in the space, driving 2.8B+ views every month with its fan-edit campaigns.
“What separates a normal edit from a viral edit is storytelling. With a better storyline, good pacing and emotional engagement, an editor can captivate the audience and trigger the TikTok algorithm. When people start associating extreme emotions like sorrow, anger, hype and love with a character through an edit, it leads to hyper engagement from the fans and the communities.”
Lakshay Sharma, Founder, Lkay Media
Xenoz, an anime editor with over 1M followers across platforms, has so much influence in the community that once an edit of a song or movie goes up, other editors rip the audio and make their own edits with it. Right now a YouTube search for “Xenoz On the Floor remake” turns up 500 other videos with millions of views combined.
Even streamers react to fan edits of themselves on TikTok and other platforms. One of the best examples is Sanchezamv’s edit of IShowSpeed: Speed reacted to it live with his audience and turned the moment into a trend. Marlon, another well-known streamer, is a second example.
Fan editors are power players on TikTok, driving more engagement than any other community on the internet.
If you have a viral song or show and it does not have an edit trend on TikTok or any other platform, you are missing out on millions of views. Literally.
Want an edit trend behind your release?
Tell us what you are putting out and we will tell you what the edit angle is.
Start a campaign