Ranking Fourth Generation Girl Group TikTok Hashtag Views (or: Itzy Is Somehow Still on Top)

Back in 2021, I posted a thread ranking TikTok hashtag views for Fourth Generation girl groups. Given the tremendous growth of the platform in the intervening time period, KpopJop requested an updated count, hence this new thread.

To generate the ranking, I simply looked up the views for each group by visiting the web site https://www.tiktok.com/tag/example, where example is the hashtag of interest. My results are shown in the chart below, and the numbers are current as of roughly 2023-02-10 18:55 GMT:

TikTokViews_4G_GG.png

As was the case previously, TikTok hashtag views are concentrated heavily in the top performing groups. It's important to note that Itzy has actually been able to maintain their significant lead in this metric, despite strong competition from new groups and constant accusations that they're "flopping".

In addition, I'm a bit surprised at how well Kep1er does here, and I'd also say that Secret Number over-performs in this regard.

Quote from citron-icy

My 3 4th gen group are here

Ah, so based on your badges, I'm assuming that your top three are Itzy, Purple Kiss, and (G)I-dle.

Quote from whiplashed

This data is all accumulative right? Then it would’ve been embarrassing if Itzy didn’t come out on top because they’re the oldest big 4 gg in existence here and had like double or triple or even quadruple the amount of time compared to other big company ggs to accumulate these tiktok views lol. The result is really not that shocking or illogical by any means, more like understandable at best. Can’t really draw much conclusion from this except that big company groups will always have an advantage over mid tier / nugu company groups, which is old news

I'm glad that you brought up the cumulative nature of these numbers, because it's something that I was thinking about as well. All else being equal, I certainly agree that a group that's been around longer would tend to have more views.

That being said, I would posit that such an effect isn't as great as one might think in this specific case, simply because TikTok really exploded in popularity over the past couple years, and just didn't have nearly as many users in the early days of the Fourth Generation.

To explore this further, I subtracted out the views from my previous analysis (performed in May 2021), and charted the resulting pre-May 2021 and post-May 2021 views below:

TikTokViews_4G_GG_PrePostMay2021.png

It's interesting to see that even for a super early Fourth Generation group like (G)I-dle, their pre-May 2021 views only make up a small fraction of their total. I suppose this speaks to meteoric rise of TikTok in recent times.