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FormatDNA

Retention

The proportion of a video people are still watching at a given point.

Usually read as a graph. The shape matters more than the average: a cliff in the first fifteen seconds is a hook problem, a slow steady decline is a pacing problem, and a mid-video cliff usually marks the exact moment you started saying something the audience did not come for.

Retention is the closest thing to an honest signal a creator gets, because it measures behaviour rather than opinion.

Formats where this matters most