For You Page

TikTok popularised the name, and the idea has since been copied under other labels: Reels shows a recommended feed, and Shorts does the same on YouTube. The defining property is that distribution is not tied to your follower count. A new account and an established one enter the same pool, and the feed decides per viewer.

Ranking is driven by observed behaviour. Watch through rate, rewatches, shares, comments, and follows after viewing all feed back into who sees the video next, and each wave of viewers either extends reach or ends it. Signals about the video itself, such as sound, captions, and topic, mostly help decide who gets tested first.

The common misreading is treating the FYP as a single switch that can be turned on. There is no publish time, hashtag set, or caption trick that places a video there, and creators who blame a hashtag for a flat video usually had a weak first three seconds. Reach also varies enormously between posts on the same account, so single video results say little.

The workflow implication is volume with variation: enough posts to give the system material to test, with hooks and formats that differ, rather than one polished upload per week. Clipping long content into many candidates is one way to reach that cadence.