What's Selling and Why
Updated Monday 19 October 2026, 9:58am Pacific
Mike, talking straight to camera, is our best seller, and almost no other brand puts its founder on camera.
- Mike on camera sells on TikTok. His 15 videos brought 43 of our 102 TikTok orders, 9 to 17 October.
- Leaving out “In 2 years I turn 60”, his other 14 videos brought about $11.60 of TikTok Shop sales per $1 of ads.
- All our TikTok ads: $3.33 of TikTok Shop sales per $1 of ads, 9 to 17 October (TikTok's own count, returning buyers included).
- First-time TikTok buyers alone, 14 to 16 October (the latest 3 days, the window our TikTok budget rule checks every 3 days): $2.20 of sales per $1 of ads; break-even is $2.79.
- That's 79 cents earned back per $1, or $1.36 with half the Amazon and website sales TikTok brings. $1.00 is break-even.
- On Meta, video ads beat image ads: 63 cents earned back per $1 (79 cents with Amazon) against 33 cents (42 cents), to 17 October. $1.00 is break-even.
- Best TikTok sellers: list videos. Mike's three list videos brought $1,358 of TikTok Shop sales, more than his 11 other videos together, at about $9.40 per $1 of ads.
- Best Meta seller opens with a new study: “Scientists may have just found the Holy Grail” brought 14 of our 29 Meta new customers, 8 to 17 October.
- Founders almost never appear: 3 of 301 other brands' Meta videos that ran 90 days or more, and none of TikTok Shop's top ones we watched.
Our best sellers
- TikTok: TikTok Shop sales per $1 of ads, every buyer counted, 9 October (or the day posted) to 17 October.
- Meta: earned back per $1 of ads from new customers, launch to 17 October. $1.00 is break-even.
- “With Amazon” adds the Amazon sales our Meta ads bring (Claude's estimate, worked out on 16 October from how Amazon sales rise and fall with our Meta spend).
TikTok · Mike · 2½ min · posted 13 Oct
“Top 3 supplements to help you live to be 200+”
12 orders and $794 of sales from $85.73 of ads: about $9.30 of TikTok Shop sales per $1 of ads.
TikTok · Mike · 5 min · posted 13 Oct
“My top five longevity supplements”
8 orders and $515 of sales from $58.59 of ads: about $8.80 of TikTok Shop sales per $1 of ads.
TikTok · BROQ jar, no face · 24 sec
“Biggest Black Friday deal,” from last November
9 orders and $757 of sales from $214 of ads: about $3.50 of TikTok Shop sales per $1 of ads.
TikTok · Mike · 69 sec
“Why did my doctor never tell me about this” from May 2026
3 orders and $186 of sales from $2.92 of ads: about $64 of TikTok Shop sales per $1, on almost no ad money.
Meta · Mike · SPMD-99 · 2 min
“Scientists may have just found the Holy Grail”
14 new customers from $670 of ads, 12 to 17 October. It earned back 80 cents per $1, or $1.01 with Amazon.
Sunday 18 October: 4 more new customers.
New on Meta · Mike · all three products · 2½ min
The same “Top 3” video, on Meta
1 new customer from $23.52 of ads, 13 to 17 October. Too early to judge: Meta has barely spent on it.
New on Meta · Mike · BROQ · 3 min
“If you take sulforaphane, you need to hear this”
1 new customer from $15.43 of ads in its first two days, 16 and 17 October. Too early to judge.
Meta · image · BROQ
“Supercharge your immune system this fall and winter”
1 new customer from $30.59 of ads, 9 to 15 October: earned back $2.89 per $1 ($3.65 with Amazon). Our best image ad, from a single customer.
Every ad and video, with its numbers day by day, is in the ad library ›
To find one there, tap More filters and type a few words of its title, such as “Holy Grail”, into Search.
What our sellers have in common
1. Mike, talking straight to camera
TikTok Shop sales by who is on camera, 9 to 17 October (all TikTok: $6,169 and 102 orders from $1,853 of ads)
The rows leave out $119 of ads on 43 videos that each got under $10 and sold nothing.
Mike's row includes “In 2 years I turn 60” ($278 from $564 of ads). His other 14 videos brought $2,149 from $185 of ads, about $11.60 per $1.
On Meta, Mike is in 21 of our 23 video ads. Those 23 earned back 63 cents per $1 (79 cents with Amazon), 11 to 17 October.
Our 14 Meta image ads earned back 33 cents per $1 (42 cents with Amazon), 8 to 17 October. $1.00 is break-even.
One of Nick's newest TikTok videos, “3rd Party Tested” (posted 15 October), brought a $149 order from $5.97 of ads in its first three days.
2. A list opening on TikTok, a study opening on Meta
TikTok Shop sales from Mike's 15 videos, 9 to 17 October
“Top 3” and “My top five” show the list's title on screen from the start. Mike opens with a personal line: So, I'm 59 years old.
On Meta, “My top five” brought 3 new customers from $527 of ads, 13 to 17 October: 47 cents earned back per $1 (58 cents with Amazon).
The study opening did best on Meta: Scientists may have just found the Holy Grail of longevity supplements.
3. Our sellers run long; most very short clips sold nothing
| TikTok videos, 9 to 17 October | Length |
|---|---|
| Videos that sold (31 we could time) | Typically 95 seconds |
| Got $10 or more of ads and sold nothing (13) | Typically 11 seconds |
| Mike's videos that sold | 69 seconds to 5 minutes |
The 10 shortest (11 seconds or less) are all affiliates' clips, and 7 of them sold nothing. Every Meta video we run is 82 seconds or longer.
4. Old videos keep selling
19 older videos on our TikTok accounts (posted May 2025 to May 2026) brought 28 orders and $1,557 of sales from $116 of ads, 9 to 17 October.
Mike is in 10 of them. The 19 leave out the two older videos TikTok spent the most on, “Biggest Black Friday deal” and “In 2 years I turn 60”.
5. One video took a big share of the TikTok money, 9 to 17 October
TikTok · Mike · posted March 2026
“In 2 years I turn 60”
TikTok's automatic campaign put $564 on it, 9 to 17 October: 30% of our TikTok ad money, about $63 a day.
It brought 6 orders and $278: 49 cents of TikTok Shop sales per $1, a seventh of our $3.33 average.
TikTok credits each sale to the last video the buyer watched. So a video that starts people on the way to buying, before another video closes the sale, can look worse in these figures than it really is.
TikTok has already cut what it spends on this video by itself: $29 over the latest 3 days we have (19 to 21 October), against about $63 a day from 9 to 17 October.
What other brands' best-running ads do
We can't see other brands' Meta sales, so we use how long an ad ran. Brands keep paying for ads that make money.
We looked at 1,592 Meta ads from 67 brands like ours, copied by Foreplay (an ad-research service) on 30 September and 1 October.
| In their videos | Ran 90 days or more (301 videos) | Stopped before 60 days (35 videos) |
|---|---|---|
| A doctor, scientist or expert talking to camera | 51 (17%) | 0 |
| Run as a partnership ad, under a creator's or expert's name | 60 (20%) | 0 |
| A first-order discount | 33 (11%) | 15 (43%) |
| 31 to 60 seconds long | 120 (40%) | 12 (34%) |
| The founder talking to camera | 3 (1%) | 2 (6%), too few to tell |
Five long runners from brands most like ours:
| Brand | Days it had run, to 30 September | Who's on camera | First line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qualia | 517 | Dave Asprey, author | “If you're over 40 and you feel like your energy isn't the same as it was, that's because it's not.” |
| MitoQ | 457 | Its chief scientist, answering a customer's comment | “I'd like to just tell you about one [study] where adults were given MitoQ” |
| Fatty15 | 442 | Dr Drew Pinsky | “Hey, Dr. Drew Pinsky here, and I want to introduce you to the one supplement you should be taking” |
| NOVOS | 406 | A woman creator | “I was doing some research into why it seems like celebrities and influencers age a lot slower than the rest of us.” |
| Rho (sulforaphane) | 155 | Dr Kristen Holmes | “You can have normal labs and still feel off.” |
Room for BROQ on Meta: Avmacol, Healthbiotics and Pure TheraPro Rx, all sulforaphane brands, run no Meta ads at all (Meta's public Ad Library, 18 October).
BrocElite does: 58 new ads, 8 to 15 October. Its ad reaching the most people opens Microplastics are in the food, the water, the air.
On TikTok Shop
Other brands' TikTok sales here are estimates from FastMoss, a service that tracks every TikTok Shop seller.
- The 30 best-selling supplement videos each sold an estimated $235,000 to $774,000 by about 1 October. All came from creators' accounts, 29 boosted by the brand as ads.
- None of the 26 we could watch shows a founder, and 22 of them push a deal.
- Top 20 longevity videos (NMN, NAD, spermidine): half run longer than 2¼ minutes, close to Mike's lengths. None of the 16 we could watch shows a founder.
- Nearest to our “Top 3”: a 50-year-old woman's car selfie about the four things she takes daily. It sold an estimated $131,000 of Cata-Kor's bundle by about 1 October.
- Sulforaphane and spermidine are small on TikTok. In the 28 days to about 17 October, the top sulforaphane product sold an estimated $19,179 (BROQ was second); spermidine's top, $3,578.
Us beside them
| Our best sellers (Mike on camera) | Other brands' best runners | |
|---|---|---|
| Who's on camera | Mike, our founder | Doctors, experts and creators; almost never a founder |
| How it opens | TikTok: a list's title and a personal line from Mike. Meta: a study | A problem the viewer has, a celebrity clip, or an expert introducing themselves |
| Length | 69 seconds to 5 minutes | Meta: most often 31 to 60 seconds. TikTok longevity: half run over 2¼ minutes |
| Whose account | Ours | TikTok: creators' own, boosted by the brand. Meta: mostly the brand's own page |
| Deals | Don't lead with one | Most TikTok sellers push one; Meta's long runners mostly don't |
What we could try, and why
More list videos with Mike on TikTok
Mike's three list videos brought about $9.40 of TikTok Shop sales per $1 of ads, nearly 3 times our $3.33 average.
TikTok breaks even at about $2.79 of first-time-buyer sales per $1. TikTok can't split out first-time buyers by video, so the lists' exact margin is unknown.
Videos from women creators in their 50s
7 of TikTok Shop's top 50 longevity videos feature a woman who says she's in her 50s. Together they sold an estimated $463,000 by about 1 October.
Our 29 affiliate videos, mostly short jar clips, brought 10 orders and $531 of sales from $279 of ads, 9 to 17 October.
A partnership ad with an expert on Meta
One in five of other brands' long-running videos ran under a creator's or expert's name. None of the ones that stopped early did.
Where the numbers come from
- Our TikTok sales: TikTok's own report of sales by video and day (GMV Max), 9 to 17 October, read 18 October. It counts every buyer, new or returning.
- TikTok earned back per $1: first-time-buyer sales ÷ ad spend ÷ $2.79 (TikTok's break-even), 14 to 16 October. First-time means no order in the 45 days before.
- Our Meta new customers: website orders from people with no order from us in the 45 days before, matched to each ad by its tracking tag.
- Meta earned back per $1: new-customer sales ÷ ad spend ÷ the product's break-even.
- Plans count at less than full price because they leave us less: monthly at 90%, annual at 70% (set with Mike, 14 October).
- Break-evens (set 14 October from our product margins and TikTok's fees): Meta $1.59 to $1.73 of sales per $1 by product; TikTok $2.79.
- With Amazon: Claude's estimates of 16 October, from how weekly Amazon and website sales move with our ad spend. Meta adds 24 to 26%; TikTok counts half, to be cautious.
- Who's on camera: each video's thumbnail and first 25 to 75 seconds of sound, 18 October.
- Other brands: Foreplay's copy of Meta's public Ad Library (30 September to 1 October), the Ad Library itself (18 October), and FastMoss (1 to 2 and 18 October).