What creators actually build content strategies around, counted across 2,373 pillars
What 2,373 content pillars from real analysed creators cover, and why the number of pillars you run does not matter. Measured 18 September 2026.
What the numbers say
Across 602 analysed accounts the median number of content pillars is 4, and every account falls between 2 and 6. Of those, 421 also have reels we can measure. Grouping those 421 by pillar count and taking how far each account's reels travel past its own following gives 0.51 for the 60 accounts running three pillars, 0.52 for the 266 running four and 0.50 for the 91 running five. Those are the same number. The two accounts running six and the two running two are too few to say anything about, and are left out rather than dressed up.
So the common advice to narrow down to three pillars has no support here, and neither does the advice to broaden out. What the theme table does show is that the things creators organise around are far less varied than the accounts themselves: personal story, teaching, products, money and lifestyle account for most of what gets named. If your pillars do not map onto any of those, that is worth a second look, and it might be a good sign rather than a bad one.
Sample of 2,373, measured on 2026-09-18. Scrptly production database, queried 2026-09-18. Content pillars across accounts with a follower count, reach measured per account as the median of its reels.
The measurement
Every content pillar named by our analysis across accounts with a follower count, 2,373 of them. Each theme is a group of words we searched for in the pillar name. A pillar can match more than one theme, and roughly 30 percent match none, so these are frequencies rather than a division of the whole. They are ordered by how often they appear.
| Theme | Pillars | Share of all pillars |
|---|---|---|
| Personal story or journey | 325 | 14% |
| Teaching or how-to | 288 | 12% |
| Product, tool or review | 262 | 11% |
| Money, business or career | 215 | 9% |
| Lifestyle or day in the life | 180 | 8% |
| Motivation or mindset | 156 | 7% |
| Humour or entertainment | 129 | 5% |
| Community or audience interaction | 58 | 2% |
| Transformation or before and after | 55 | 2% |
What that looks like end to end
Input: The handle tejashullur run through Scrptly as a creator analysis, read 2026-09-18. 47,191 followers.
Three pillars, and they are unusually specific: Relationship Dynamics and Infidelity, Behind-the-Scenes and Expert Processes, and Data-Driven Insights. Two of the three fall outside the common themes above entirely. The analysis describes the method as taking relatable and often uncomfortable subjects, bringing expert or data-backed material to them, and structuring each reel so the payoff arrives late. Across the 8 reels we hold, the median got 794,846 views against 47,191 followers, which is 16.84 times its own following, where the median account in this corpus manages 0.51. Median length 81.2 seconds, well past the corpus median of 48.1.
Score returned: 16.84. 16.84 is the median views per follower across the reels we hold for this account, not a Scrptly score. It is included because the point of the example is reach relative to audience, and three pillars did not hold this account back.
What to do next
- Write down your own pillars, then check them against the nine themes. The useful question is not whether you have the right number, because the number does not appear to matter, it is whether each pillar is specific enough that somebody else could not have written it.
- If every one of your pillars lands in the top five themes, you are describing the same content as most of the corpus. The worked example has two pillars that fit none of them, and reaches 16.84 times its following.
- Run one creator you admire through Scrptly and read their pillars before you copy a single video. Two analyses are free, and the pillar list tells you what they are actually doing, which is usually narrower than it looks from the feed.