Virlo Year in Review

Progress at a Glance

March 01, 2025 → January 01, 2026

On March 1, 2025, Virlo launched with a scrappy three-person team. We had a general thesis: as creators more rapidly become mini-businesses around the world, the quality of data they can leverage becomes more and more important to their success.

No users.
No subscriptions.
No indexed videos.
No connected accounts.

What we did have was conviction: that short-form video had become the most important communication medium on the internet, and that the tooling to understand it was (and still is today) fundamentally insufficient.

Creators were guessing.
Operators were late.
Researchers were locked out entirely.

Virlo was built to make short-form video legible. To make the data actionable, and to put creator-led businesses around the world in the driver’s seat. To turn data into dollars.

Numbers at a Glance (From Zero)

As of January 2, 2026:

• 62,115 total users

• 3,261 active subscriptions

• 1,431,121 indexed short-form videos

• 9,101 connected creator accounts

• 0 → 100% of all growth achieved within 10 months

All figures below reflect cumulative progress since March 1, 2025.

Platform Scale

Users & Subscriptions

• 62,115 registered users

• 3,261 paying subscribers

• 5.25% user-to-subscriber conversion rate

• Subscription base built entirely organically from zero

The first 10 months of Virlo have been marked by our push to move from curiosity usage (1–2 logins and churn) to long-term, sustained usage.

We’ve done this by increasing our communication with users, implementing loops that reward consistent usage, and building toward demand as we better understand our higher-value users.

One of the largest challenges this past year was pivoting away from the general creator we served early on. This hurt the business in the short term, but was ultimately the right decision. As growth has returned, it has returned with stickier users.

Data Ingestion & Coverage

Indexed Video Summary

• 1,431,121 total short-form videos indexed

• Sourced across TikTok and YouTube Shorts

• Continuously refreshed with daily ingestion cycles

Categorization Quality

• 107,964 videos classified as “Unknown”

• 7.54% of total indexed content

• 92.46% successfully categorized

Reducing unknown classification became a core infrastructure priority as the platform scaled. The remaining unknowns primarily reflect edge-case content, emergent formats, or intentionally ambiguous creator behavior.

Our next large jump in data ingestion and quality will come from ads content and predictive clusters of rapidly rising content, closer to real time. We see use cases for real-time data across many fields, including ecommerce, finance, and politics.

Connected Accounts

Virlo evolved from passive observation to direct creator-level insight.

• 9,101 total connected accounts

  • 5,994 YouTube accounts (65.9%)

  • 3,107 TikTok accounts (34.1%)

All connected accounts were onboarded within this reporting period, enabling deeper performance tracking, historical context, and creator-level pattern recognition.

Product Evolution

From Tracking to Intelligence

In early 2025, Virlo functioned primarily as a monitoring tool. We had a very simple dashboard built around manually gathered niches.

By January 2026, we expanded into a full intelligence layer for short-form video.

Key milestones included:

• Daily cross-platform trend ingestion

• Topic-level clustering instead of single-video tracking

• Custom Niches for user-defined markets

• Orbit, enabling narrative-level social listening

• Content Studio, translating data into usable outputs

• Public APIs, opening Virlo to developers and researchers

Virlo stopped answering “what went viral” and started answering “why it matters.”

Orbit & Custom Niche Tracking: Narrative at Scale

Orbit and Custom Niche Tracking marked a structural shift in the platform.

Instead of passively surfacing trends, users could actively interrogate the ecosystem:

• Define keywords and themes

• Observe cross-platform narrative movement

• Measure acceleration within topics they care about

• Run research without manual collection

Orbit and Custom Niches unlocked use cases well beyond creators, including:

• Market and consumer research

• Editorial analysis

• Academic and exploratory work

• Strategic planning and competitive intelligence

This expanded Virlo’s audience while reinforcing its core thesis: creators everywhere today will be businesses tomorrow. This trend is accelerating rapidly and remains underpriced and undervalued by the broader market.

What We Learned

Volume only matters if it compounds into insight
The value of 1.4M videos lies in structure, not scale alone.

Creators and researchers converge on truth
Different incentives, same need: reliable signal.

APIs change who shows up
Opening the platform expanded Virlo’s surface area without diluting focus.

Speed compounds when paired with restraint
Weekly shipping mattered more than perfect planning.

Where We Are Now

As of January 1, 2026:

• Tens of thousands of users

• Thousands of paying customers

• Over a million videos continuously analyzed

• Thousands of creator accounts directly connected

Looking Forward

The next phase is depth, not breadth.

• Better narrative resolution

• Refined tooling (which likely means removing more than adding over the next year)

• More expressive research and more “fun” ways to access and use the data

• Continued expansion of Virlo’s brand and research footprint

Short-form video is not a trend.

It is the emotional layer of the modern internet. It’s where consumer decisions are made. It’s where culture and moments now happen in real time and are shared globally in an instant.

Virlo exists to map it.