One of the least understood aspects of TikTok Shop is not how to create videos, but how long they will remain economically productive. Without a clear understanding of how published videos translate into economic impact over time, sellers struggle to plan how much content they need to source each month.

That uncertainty ultimately boils down to three questions: how many affiliate videos ever make it onto GMV Max, how quickly does that inventory turn over, and what does that imply for the volume of videos brands need to source to sustain spend? In this article, we analyze large-scale TikTok Shop data to answer those questions and establish a practical framework for planning video supply.

What Shelf Life Actually Matters?

To answer these questions meaningfully, it is first necessary to clarify what “shelf life” matters from a business perspective. We have described TikTok Shop’s underlying economic model in prior work, and it is increasingly familiar to sellers operating at scale. Brands source hundreds or thousands of commission-based affiliates, who collectively generate a large volume of organic content. From that body of content, only a small subset is strong enough to warrant paid amplification.

As a result, the relevant notion of shelf life is not how long a video remains visible on TikTok or continues to accumulate organic views. For planning and forecasting purposes, the only shelf life that matters is how long a video remains productive once it is selected into GMV Max. That is the inventory sellers need to keep filled, and that is where content supply constraints become binding.

How Many Videos Ever Make It Onto GMV Max?

The first hard constraint in this system is the proportion of sourced videos that ever qualify for GMV Max. Based on analysis of more than 30,000 affiliate videos published across multiple categories during Q4 2025, we find that this share averages approximately 6 percent, with meaningful variation by category, brand, and month¹.

This parameter is foundational for planning. A 6 percent qualification rate reduces the effective supply of usable content by more than an order of magnitude and defines the top of the funnel for GMV Max investment. In practical terms, the vast majority of affiliate videos will never become scalable paid assets.

That concentration is not unique to TikTok Shop. Media channels are inherently hit-driven, and value creation tends to be highly skewed toward a small fraction of assets. TikTok Shop follows the same pattern: a small share of videos absorbs the majority of scalable spend.

This baseline can be materially improved through better affiliate selection, higher posting compliance, clearer creative guidance, and more systematic capture of post authorizations. In practice, platforms that apply AI-driven optimization across these dimensions—such as Trendio—can shift both qualification rates and downstream performance. For conservative planning purposes, however, a 6 percent qualification rate remains a realistic and defensible assumption.

What Is the Shelf Life of Videos on GMV Max?

The next question is what happens to those videos once they make it into GMV Max. To answer this, we analyzed more than one million GMV Max video-week observations across brands and categories.

Looking first at the unweighted average, the results align with common intuition about TikTok’s fast-moving environment. On average, a video remains active² on GMV Max for just under three weeks. Most content has a short fuse, and many videos churn quickly.

For GMV Max planning, however, this headline number is not the relevant metric. What matters operationally is the weighted average shelf life, where each video is weighted by the amount of GMV Max spend it receives. Videos that attract meaningful spend tend to be stronger performers, and the GMV Max system seeks to extract value from them over a longer period of time. For planning purposes, this weighted average is the metric that reflects how inventory actually behaves.

Exhibit 1 illustrates this dynamic clearly. Videos that receive higher levels of GMV Max spend tend to remain active for longer periods, while lower-spend videos churn much more quickly. This pattern is consistent across brands and categories and reflects the GMV Max algorithm’s incentive to continue allocating budget to assets that are delivering value.

When shelf life is weighted by spend, the picture changes materially. On a conservative, outlier-adjusted basis, the weighted average shelf life of videos on GMV Max is approximately 8.9 weeks. This estimate excludes the top 3 percent of videos by longevity to avoid over-reliance on a small number of extreme performers; without that adjustment, the raw weighted average is approximately 10.5 weeks. In practical terms, the videos that absorb the majority of GMV Max spend tend to remain productive for a bit over two months.

Bringing It All Together

In earlier work published in December 2025, we explored a foundational planning question for TikTok Shop sellers: how many videos do you actually need to win on the platform? At the time, we proposed a broad planning range of 50 to 100 videos sourced for every $1,000 of GMV Max spend, based on early assumptions about qualification rates and video longevity.

The analysis in this article allows us to refine that framework with greater precision. Using large-scale data, we find that approximately 6 percent of affiliate videos ever make it onto GMV Max and that the videos which absorb the majority of GMV Max spend remain productive for roughly nine weeks on a weighted basis. Taken together, those parameters imply a tighter planning benchmark: sellers should expect to source approximately 70 videos for every $1,000 invested in GMV Max ads.

More broadly, this work reinforces the underlying insight from our December article. TikTok Shop is best understood not as a creative problem, but as a supply-planning problem governed by decay. Affiliate videos function as inventory, GMV Max determines which assets scale, and shelf life dictates how quickly that inventory must be replenished. Using AI-driven optimization platforms such as Trendio can improve both the likelihood that a video qualifies for GMV Max and the length of time it remains productive once it does. The result is not just operational efficiency through automation, but a multiplicative effect on overall TikTok Shop channel returns, driven by better inputs and longer-lasting assets.