Most Black Friday trend pieces are forecasts. This one is a count. We took the US creators who were posting on TikTok and YouTube in November 2024 and were still posting in November 2025, and compared what they said about Black Friday in each season. Because they are the same creators both years, a change in the count is a change in what they did, not a change in who we happened to be watching.
That is 367,605 TikTok accounts, 139,570 YouTube channels that posted long videos in both Novembers, and 96,979 that posted Shorts in both. Four things changed between the two seasons. One of them changes how you should brief and track a Black Friday campaign this year.
Creators wrote Black Friday out instead of tagging it
On TikTok, the number of these creators who posted about Black Friday barely moved: 35,137 in the 2024 season and 34,696 in 2025. How they said it changed a great deal.
Show the numbers
| Creators | Creators |
|---|---|
| Wrote the words, 2024 | 17,656 |
| Wrote the words, 2025 | 21,793 |
| Hashtag only, 2024 | 23,316 |
| Hashtag only, 2025 | 19,111 |
Creators who wrote “Black Friday” in a caption rose 23%, from 17,656 to 21,793, and their posts rose 44%, from 30,467 to 43,875. Creators who only tagged it fell 18%, and hashtag-only posts fell 29%. The hashtags went out of these creators’ captions generally, not only at Black Friday: #fyp was on 32% of their TikToks in November 2024 and on 25% in November 2025.
Two things follow. The first is about the brief. A brief that hands the creator a list of hashtags gets the hashtags, which last year were the part of the caption creators were dropping. A brief that asks them to say what the deal is and when it ends gets the words a viewer reads. The creative brief guide covers what to put in it.
The second is about tracking. A campaign report that finds its posts by searching for a campaign hashtag missed more posts in 2025 than in 2024, and the trend points one way. Find the posts through what each creator was given instead: their own code and their own tagged link. The guide to hashtags, mentions, links and codes covers which to use for what.
Key metrics
Content
24
Total views
2.2M
Total comments
867K
Hours watched
1.4M
Content timeline
ViewsContentOct 3 to Oct 15
Streamforge combines creator discovery and audience vetting with campaign operations, including tracking links and reporting, so the links you hand each creator and the report on what they did live in the same campaign.
Short video carried the growth
From here on we count a post when it says the words, because hashtags were falling for reasons that had nothing to do with Black Friday. By that count, the growth came from short video.
On TikTok, creators who wrote about Black Friday rose 23%. On YouTube Shorts, channels did the same, from 3,628 to 4,465, also 23%. Long YouTube videos rose 4%, from 7,624 channels to 7,924.
The long-form number hides a squeeze. These channels published 12% fewer long videos from September to December 2025 than in the same months of 2024, about 4.4 million against 5 million, yet their Black Friday videos went up 7%. A shrinking schedule gave Black Friday a bigger share. If a long video is part of your plan, book it early: a channel making fewer videos has fewer slots to sell, and a long video’s script, filming and edit put its deadlines weeks before a Short’s. The Black Friday campaign timeline sets those deadlines.
Shorts went the other way. Those channels posted 11% more Shorts over the season and 30% more Shorts about Black Friday, so the new Black Friday creators of 2025 were mostly making short video.
Early Black Friday spread on every platform
The phrase that grew fastest was “early Black Friday”, with its variants “pre-Black Friday”, “Black Friday early”, “Black Friday deals early” and “early access Black Friday”. On TikTok, creators using it rose 32%, from 715 to 941. On long YouTube videos, channels rose 33%, from 393 to 521, and on Shorts 25%, from 195 to 243. These are small groups, but the direction was the same everywhere, and the posts grew faster than the creators: 47% on TikTok, 74% on long videos and 41% on Shorts.
The wider Black Friday count leaned early too, on two of the three platforms.
Show the numbers
| Platform and weeks | Change from 2024 (%) |
|---|---|
| TikTok, before Black Friday week | 32 |
| TikTok, Black Friday week | 25 |
| Long YouTube videos, before Black Friday week | 8 |
| Long YouTube videos, Black Friday week | 0 |
| YouTube Shorts, before Black Friday week | 24 |
| YouTube Shorts, Black Friday week | 24 |
On TikTok, creators writing about Black Friday before the week rose 32%, from 7,509 to 9,887, against 25% in the week itself. Long-form channels rose 8% before the week and not at all in it. Shorts rose 24% in both.
So the first Black Friday posts in your category may go up earlier this year than last, and some of them will be your competitors’ creators announcing early access. You can see that as it happens rather than finding out in December.
Market timeline
Your competitors and market, day by day, newest first
Fri, Oct 9
Corsair ran a sponsored post with
Rap Techinstagram · 14.2K views
Thu, Oct 8
Razer ran a sponsored post with
always_a_failure_tiktok · 20.7K views
Tue, Oct 6
Corsair ran a sponsored post with
Hello Pixelsinstagram · 26.5K views
Streamforge is an influencer marketing platform for creator discovery, audience analysis, competitive intelligence, campaign workflow, and data access by API, and the market timeline is the competitive part: when a rival’s first holiday creator posts go up, they show on that list. The competitor sponsorship guide covers what to do with it.
Black Friday pulled further ahead of Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday grew more slowly than Black Friday on every platform. On TikTok, creators who wrote “Cyber Monday” rose 7%, from 3,265 to 3,494, while Black Friday rose 23%. On long YouTube videos Cyber Monday fell 1%, and on Shorts it rose 16%. Across all three, about five creators wrote Black Friday for every one who wrote Cyber Monday in 2024, and about six in 2025.
Cyber Monday is still a day that sells. It just has less of its own creator content than it used to, so it works best as the last line of a campaign that started earlier: a story or a pinned comment from a creator who already posted, saying the deal ends tonight. The campaign ideas post has that one as its tenth idea.
The trends on one page
| What changed from 2024 to 2025 | What to do this year |
|---|---|
| TikTok creators wrote Black Friday in their captions 44% more often and tagged it 29% less | Brief for the words: the deal and when it ends. Track by code and link, not hashtag |
| Creators writing about Black Friday grew 23% on TikTok and Shorts, 4% on long YouTube videos | Expect most new Black Friday creators on short video. Book long videos first, because those channels are making fewer of them |
| “Early Black Friday” grew by a quarter to a third on every platform | Watch for rivals’ early-access posts from late October |
| Black Friday pulled further ahead of Cyber Monday | Treat Cyber Monday as a last call from creators who already posted |
How we counted. We searched the posts Streamforge holds for US creators with at least 1,000 followers or subscribers. Our data keeps each creator’s most recent posts, so we included only creators whose posts reach back before September 2024, which means their whole 2024 season is there, and who posted in both November 2024 and November 2025. That left 367,605 TikTok accounts, 139,570 YouTube channels for long videos and 96,979 for Shorts, counted separately because a channel’s long videos and Shorts are different formats. Each season runs from September 1 to December 31, in US Eastern time, and a creator counts once per season however many times they posted. A post counts as being about Black Friday when its caption, title or description says “Black Friday”, and as hashtag only when it carries a hashtag starting #blackfriday or #bfcm without the words; the other phrases work the same way. These are mentions, not sponsorships, and the accounts include some brands posting their own sales. In a blind check, two AI reviewers read random samples of the counted posts separately. Both judged 19 of 20 Black Friday posts to be about Black Friday, 39 of 40 early Black Friday posts to be about deals before the day, and 18 of 20 Cyber Monday posts to be about Cyber Monday, where the misses were descriptions too long for the reviewers to reach the words. The counts cover the creators we could follow across both seasons, so they say how those creators changed, not how big the whole market is.
