MT · The Dashboard Decoded

The Finish Rate

Industry term · Completion Rate
Why this matters

On short-form feeds, finishing is the strongest satisfied-viewer signal there is — a completed video reads as a promise kept.

The share of viewers who reached the end — short-form's king metric.

The Creator Translation
Industry Term
Completion Rate
What You Actually Mean
The Finish Rate
Psychological Trigger

What it actually measures

Completion is binary satisfaction: the viewer had a thousand exits and took none of them. Short-form lives on it because the feed's entire economy is 'did this fully deliver' — and a seamless loop can push the number past 100%, since replays count as completions.

Technical Anatomy

How to read it

  1. 1

    Completions ÷ plays. Length changes the difficulty, so track it by format, not across your whole catalog.

  2. 2

    Loops inflate it legitimately — that's the strategy working, not a bug in the data.

  3. 3

    A high finish rate with low shares usually means satisfying but not remarkable — different problem, different fix.

  4. 4

    Classic misread: comparing completion across different lengths as if the task were equal.

Application

If it's low / If it's high

completion rateshort-form

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