TikTok’s UK communications and partnerships teams briefed journalists at the company’s London office on Wednesday morning, taking the room through what British creators are doing, sector by sector.
Lauren La Faci, Communications Lead, opened with the creators themselves: Francesca Rose, who began posting this year and has passed 200,000 followers with wholesome train journeys around Britain; a Transport for London (TfL) employee posting as Tube Bellingham about the realities of the job; Rob doing Rob, a gardener in a sleepy village. Their common quality, in La Faci’s phrase, was “using their Britishness to transcend different communities”.
The fan edit outperforms the trailer by 37 to one
Lily Hall, a Partnerships Manager on TikTok UK’s entertainment team, works with studios, broadcasters and streamers. Over the past year, she said, 12 million posts about film and television have been published on TikTok every day globally, and 99% of them are fan content. Her example was Lionsgate. The studio’s official trailer for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, posted on its own account, had 227,000 views. Its best-performing fan edit of the franchise had 8.4 million. The edit she played had been made by an in-house TikTok fan editor Lionsgate now employs.
“We’ve seen examples of studios such as Lionsgate or HBO hiring TikTok editors as in-house trailer makers after having seen their edits on the platform,” Hall said. Around Spider-Man: Brand New Day, TikTok ran a competition inviting fan editors to recut the official trailer asset, with the director, Destin Daniel Cretton, picking the winners; Spider-Man edit posts grew 104% over three months. Movie-edit posts are up 24% in the same period. “No film or TV show can truly be considered a fan favourite until the TikTok editors have worked their magic on it,” she said.
Hall traced the studios’ relationship with creators from paid promotion, through junkets and red carpets, to behind-the-scenes filming on sets as large as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and now to casting. George Clarke was on the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing last year; the football creator John Nellis is in this year’s line-up. Searches for the programme rose 1,329% in the week of its launch compared with the week before.
The X Factor has not aired since 2018 and still draws 3.7m views a day
Love Island generates more posts than any other British programme, 1.4 million globally for the latest series, and was the UK’s top search term on TikTok during finals week this year and last. Big Brother is having its biggest season in years. The X Factor, off air since 2018, still draws more than 3.7 million views a day, and a Saturday Night Live UK sketch parodying its peak years has sent creators back to the 2008 to 2011 series. Horror posts are up 26% in six months; the audience that found the genre through this year’s creator-led hits Obsession and Backrooms is working backwards through Scream, Halloween and Friday the 13th.
Anime, Hall added, now tops the platform’s television leaderboard in Britain, with creators posting about Naruto, Jujutsu Kaisen and One Piece more than any other shows. A community the industry treated as niche is outranking Hollywood on fan conversation.
Fans have moved from promotion into development
The claim Hall pressed hardest was that fan communities now shape the IP itself. Prime Video announced the leads for its Fourth Wing series last week; Emilio Sakraya, cast as Xaden, had been campaigned for by the book’s TikTok fans for months. Dungeon Crawler Carl, originally self-published, went into development on the strength of its online following. Studios are working through romance and young-adult fiction, Heated Rivalry and Off Campus among them, and through the classics: Sense and Sensibility, Wuthering Heights, The Odyssey and a forthcoming Pride and Prejudice, where book, film and history creators converge on the same release. “Whether it’s execs taking note of who fans want to see cast, or originally self-published titles going into development because of this huge online community behind them, it’s been really interesting to see that develop this year,” Hall said.
BookTok now has an official chart and a bricks-and-mortar footprint
Yaz How, TikTok’s Head of Emerging Communities, took the publishing numbers. More than 50 million books recommended on TikTok were sold across Europe in 2025, she said. The official BookTok chart, published monthly with NielsenIQ BookData sales figures behind it, ran from romantasy to crime to comedy in September. Rebecca Yarros’s Threshing Day, a story collection set in the Fourth Wing world, was her example of the community doing more than recommending: fan theories, dream castings and, in one creator’s case, commenters talking her into a book she had meant to skip.
TikTok’s own survey figures: 66% of BookTok users say the community has led them to read or listen to a new book, 76% have tried new authors or genres, and 54% say they have supported a local business or bookshop as a result. Bookshops are using the platform in turn, and their followers, How said, are there for the owners as much as the stock. Jack Edwards, whom she called the internet’s resident librarian, has taken his audience off platform into the Inklings book club and its podcast. His response to Alix Earle’s admission that she had never read a book was a reading list for beginners. How’s gloss on why that converts: “You don’t need to be a literary expert or to have read all the classics to be part of the BookTok community.”
TikTok supplied almost all of the figures, but the companies it is pitching to have already acted on them: Lionsgate and HBO have put fan editors on the payroll, Strictly has cast two creators in two years, and the UK’s BookTok chart now runs on NielsenIQ sales data. Each of those decisions rests on an audience that TikTok’s recommendation system assembled and can reassemble at will, a dependency the morning did not chart.