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Retention curve - Instagram Glossary

A retention curve plots the percentage of viewers still watching against elapsed time. Reading it tells you exactly where a video loses people, which is far more actionable than an average watch-time number that hides the shape of the loss.

Three shapes recur. A cliff in the first two seconds means the hook failed and nothing downstream matters. A steady mid-video slope means pacing - too long between points, or a visual that stops changing. A drop at a specific timestamp usually points at one identifiable moment: a slow transition, an ad-sounding sentence, a claim that broke trust.

The useful discipline is to look at the curve before rewriting anything. Most creators rewrite the middle of a video that was losing everyone at second two, and conclude that content does not work when what failed was the opening frame.

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