For You is a sequence of small rooms. The badge is what the last room left on the door.
Each room is a test audience measured in hundreds, then thousands, then more — only if the previous room watched, rewatched, and did not swipe off in the first second. The public number you can buy is a residue of those rooms. It is not a ticket that opens the next one.
That is a different machine from a watch-page counter people read after they already clicked, and it is a different machine from a grid that prints one figure on a thumbnail before anyone taps. On TikTok the ranking question is: did this sample finish and come back. The shopping question is: do you want the residue to look inhabited when someone opens the video on purpose.
Those two questions get sold as one product. They are not. A clip that fails the first room stays small no matter what you print on it later. A clip that already passed a room can still use a larger public count when you send the link to a brand, a collab, or a comment section that will judge the post by eye.