Short-form video platforms distribute content by testing each post independently rather than by following an account. That mechanism makes producing many posts more effective than perfecting a few.
Every post is tested from scratch
A new post is shown to a small sample of viewers, and its performance in that sample decides whether it is shown more widely.
Follower count influences the composition of the initial sample and does not guarantee distribution beyond it.
This means a large account can post something that reaches almost nobody, and a new account can reach an enormous audience with one post.
Outcomes are highly skewed
Reach across posts does not cluster around an average. A small number of posts account for most of the total reach an account ever achieves.
Under that distribution, the expected return from any individual post is low and the return from having many entries is high.
Ten modest attempts will usually outperform one carefully made film, because the chance of catching the distribution mechanism scales with the number of attempts.
Prediction is unreliable in both directions
Teams are consistently poor at forecasting which of their posts will travel. The ones expected to perform frequently do not, and the offhand ones frequently do.
That is expected given how the test works, since the outcome depends on how a specific small sample responds in the first minutes.
Because prediction fails, allocating effort in proportion to expected performance allocates it incorrectly.
Production cost is the binding constraint
Volume only works if each post is cheap, which means an approvals process designed for a broadcast campaign makes the strategy impossible.
Teams that succeed here reduce the cost of a single post to hours rather than weeks, usually by pre-approving a format and a set of claims rather than each asset.
The saving is not in the shooting, which is already cheap, but in the review cycle that surrounds it.
Where volume stops helping
Posting frequently without varying anything produces many attempts at the same idea, which the test treats as one idea repeated.
What the mechanism rewards is variation in opening, subject and format, so that each attempt is a genuinely different sample.
Volume also carries brand risk in regulated or high-consideration categories, where a lightly reviewed post can create an obligation the approvals process existed to prevent.