Holiday shopping trend reports usually start from a survey of shoppers. This one starts from what creators posted. We took the same US creators as in our Black Friday trends post and counted their posts about Christmas and gifts in two holiday seasons, September to December 2024 and the same months of 2025. The creators are the same in both years, so a change in the counts is a change in what they made.
That is 367,605 TikTok accounts, 139,570 YouTube channels for long videos and 96,979 for Shorts. Three things in the counts matter for a holiday campaign this year: when the season peaks, which gift content grew, and which format it grew on. There is also a trap in counting by hashtag, and last year it pointed the wrong way.
The season did not start earlier
Every year someone says the holidays start sooner. On these creators’ feeds, they did not.
Show the numbers
| Period | Share of the season's Christmas posts (%) |
|---|---|
| September 2024 | 3.2 |
| September 2025 | 2.8 |
| October 2024 | 6.5 |
| October 2025 | 6.8 |
| November 1 to 15, 2024 | 10.4 |
| November 1 to 15, 2025 | 10.9 |
| November 16 to 30, 2024 | 13.4 |
| November 16 to 30, 2025 | 13.1 |
| December 1 to 15, 2024 | 27.2 |
| December 1 to 15, 2025 | 26.4 |
| December 16 to 31, 2024 | 39.4 |
| December 16 to 31, 2025 | 40 |
These creators posted 713,975 times about Christmas in the 2024 season and 749,566 times in 2025. In both years under a tenth of those posts went up before November, 9.7% each time, and two-thirds went up in December, 66.5% and then 66.3%. The last 16 days of December carried about two posts in every five. Each platform on its own told the same story, within a point or so.
Gift content keeps to that calendar, each kind in its own part of it:
- Gift ideas start early. About a quarter of the posts suggesting gifts went up before November, 23.6% in 2024 and 24.0% in 2025, and they peaked in the first half of December.
- Gift guides come late. Under a tenth went up before November, and close to two-thirds went up between November 16 and December 15 in both years.
- Stocking stuffers sit in between, with about a sixth of their posts up before November both years.
So last year’s calendar still holds, and it runs past Black Friday. Booking creators in October is right, because the good ones fill up, but the posts you book should land when people are looking for gifts: gift ideas from October, gift guides from mid-November to mid-December, and Christmas content through the last two weeks of December. A plan that puts every post in Black Friday week leaves out the stretch when these creators post about Christmas most.
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
Count the words, not the hashtags
If you counted gift posts by hashtag as well as by words, you would read 2025 as a bad year for gifting on TikTok. TikTok creators with a gift ideas post fell 23%, and gift guide posts fell 38%.
Count only the posts that say the words, and both went up. Creators who wrote “gift ideas” or “gifts for” rose 4% and their posts rose 18%. Creators who wrote “gift guide” rose 8% and their posts 17%. Stocking stuffers flip the same way, from a 17% fall to a 3% rise.
The difference is hashtags. These creators put fewer hashtags on everything in 2025, not only on gift posts: #fyp went from 32% of their TikToks in November 2024 to 25% in November 2025, as the Black Friday trends post sets out. A trend report that counts hashtags will show a drop in 2025 that the captions do not. The rest of this post counts the words.
Last-minute gifting grew fastest
Of the gift topics we counted, last-minute grew the most. Creators who wrote about last-minute gifts, a last-minute Christmas or last-minute shopping rose 22% across the three platforms, from 3,411 to 4,150, and their posts rose 30%, from 3,936 to 5,120. Shorts led at 33%, from 397 channels to 529, then TikTok at 25%, from 2,281 accounts to 2,848. Long videos rose 5%.
These posts run late, as the phrase promises. In 2024, 71% of last-minute posts went up between December 16 and 31, and in 2025, 66%.
The counts cannot say whether shoppers bought later. They do say creators made more for the people who did. A campaign can meet that audience with a small late wave: a few posts booked for the week before Christmas, for a gift that still arrives in time. That means a digital gift, a gift card, a subscription or something with in-store pickup, and the last order date in the brief so the creator says it out loud. Book the wave with the rest of the campaign in October, not in mid-December, when you would be asking creators to fit a post into the weeks they post about Christmas most.
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Streamforge supports campaign operations alongside discovery and audience vetting, including creator CRM with custom stages, deliverables and deadlines, so a late wave sits in the same campaign as the Black Friday posts. The campaign timeline guide covers working back from a post date.
Shorts gained on every gift topic
The change from 2024 to 2025 in the creators who wrote each phrase:
| Topic | TikTok | Long YouTube videos | YouTube Shorts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Christmas | +3% | −9% | +5% |
| Gift ideas | +4% | −7% | +10% |
| Gift guides | +8% | −9% | +7% |
| Stocking stuffers | +3% | +14% | +23% |
| Last-minute gifts | +25% | +5% | +33% |
On Shorts, every topic grew. The channels posted 11% more Shorts over the season, and their posts about gift ideas, stocking stuffers and last-minute gifts grew faster than that.
On long videos, most topics fell, and the reason is volume, not interest. These channels made 12% fewer long videos from September to December 2025 than a year before, about 4.4 million against 5 million, and the share of them about Christmas held at 2.7% both years. Stocking stuffers rose 14% even so. A long gift guide is still worth having, but these channels are making fewer videos of every kind, and a channel making fewer videos fills its slots sooner.
On TikTok, more creators wrote about every topic, but the growth was small next to how much more they posted. These accounts posted 26% more over the season. Their Christmas posts rose 9%, so Christmas took a smaller share of a busier feed, 2.7% of their posts in 2024 and 2.3% in 2025. TikTok still has by far the most gift creators: 9,204 of these TikTok accounts wrote about gift ideas last season, against 3,707 long-form channels and 2,197 Shorts channels.
For a gift campaign that means TikTok for numbers, Shorts for the pool that grew fastest, and long videos booked early. On every platform, check before you book that the creator’s audience is the one doing the buying, because a gift is bought for someone else.
Thiefs
@thiefs627K followers
Audience demographics
AI-enriched audience analysis for this creator.
- Top Country
- United States
- 52.3%
- Primary Gender
- Male
- 65.0%
- Largest Age Group
- 18-24
- 40.7%
- Top Language
- English
- 78.6%
Safety & Health
Audience Authenticity
Estimated real audience
5.0% suspected bots
MixedAudience analysis is supported across YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, and X. Streamforge’s audience analysis is AI-based and does not require the creator to authenticate through OAuth, so a Shorts channel can be checked the same way as a TikTok account before you send the brief. The creative brief guide covers what goes in that brief.
The trends on one page
| What changed from 2024 to 2025 | What to do this year |
|---|---|
| Christmas posts landed when they did the year before: under a tenth before November, two-thirds in December | Plan holiday posts through December, not only in Black Friday week |
| Gift ideas start in September and October; gift guides peak from mid-November to mid-December | Pitch gift ideas from October and aim gift guide placements at that four-week stretch |
| Counted by hashtag, TikTok gift content fell; counted by words, it rose | Read hashtag-based trend reports with care, and track your own posts by code and link |
| Last-minute gifting grew 22%, most of it in the last 16 days of December | Book a small late wave in October, for a gift that still arrives in time |
| Shorts grew on every gift topic; long videos slipped as channels made fewer | Add Shorts creators to the gift plan, and book long videos early |
How we counted. We used the same creators as the Black Friday trends post: US creators with at least 1,000 followers or subscribers whose posts in our data reach back before September 2024, so 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 under a topic when its caption, title or description says the phrase: “Christmas” or “Xmas”; “gift idea”, “gift ideas” or “gifts for”; “gift guide”; “stocking stuffer” or “stocking stuffers”; and “last minute” followed by gift, gifts, Christmas, shopping or holiday, with or without the hyphen. Hashtags alone do not count, except in the section that compares the two. These are mentions, not sponsorships, and the accounts include some brands and shops posting their own products. In a blind check, two AI reviewers read random samples of the counted posts separately, and we kept a post only when both agreed it meant what we counted. They passed 10 of 11 gift ideas posts, 15 of 16 stocking stuffer posts, 30 of 32 last-minute posts, where the misses were crafts and nail art, and 16 of 20 gift guide posts, where the misses were single product reviews with “gift guide” in a long list of tags. We did not check Christmas, which has one common meaning. 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.
