Glossary
The words, without the waffle
65 terms from short-form video, AI UGC and the advertising that runs on both. Each one gets a definition that stands on its own, an explanation of what it is actually for, and the mistake people reliably make with it.
Where two terms get confused with each other, and this category is full of pairs that do, each entry names the other and says what the difference is. Reach and impressions, saves and shares, dramatised and fabricated testimonials: the confusion between them is usually the thing that made someone look the word up in the first place.
Or browse by kind
- Format12
- The kinds of video, and what each one is structurally good at.
- Craft16
- The parts of making one: hooks, pacing, captions, safe zones.
- Metric16
- The numbers, including which of them are measuring the same thing twice.
- Distribution7
- How a post travels, and what decides whether it travels at all.
- Business7
- Briefs, rights, costs and the economics underneath the category.
- Compliance7
- What has to be labelled, what needs permission, and who enforces it.
All terms, A to Z
#
- 9:16 aspect ratioalso vertical video, portrait video
- 9:16 is the vertical aspect ratio used by TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts: nine units wide to sixteen tall, matching a phone held upright.
A
- AI avatar
- An AI avatar is a generated person used as the presenter in a video, kept consistent across clips so a series looks like it features the same individual.
- AI disclosure
- AI disclosure is the labelling of content that was generated or substantially altered by AI.
C
- Call to actionalso cta
- A call to action is the request a video makes of its viewer: comment, save, follow, or click.
- Caption
- A caption is the text posted alongside a video.
- Click-through ratealso ctr
- Click-through rate is the share of people who saw something and clicked it.
- Cold open
- A cold open starts a video in the middle of the action, with no introduction, greeting or setup.
- Community guidelines
- Community guidelines are a platform's rules about what may be posted, separate from its advertising policies.
- Completion rate
- Completion rate is the share of viewers who watched a video all the way to the end.
- Content calendar
- A content calendar is the schedule of what gets posted when.
- Content Credentialsalso c2pa, provenance metadata
- Content Credentials are tamper-evident metadata attached to a media file recording how it was made, including whether AI was involved.
- Cost per asset
- Cost per asset is what one finished piece of creative costs to produce, including everything that went into it.
- Cost per viewalso cpv
- Cost per view is spend divided by views.
- Cover framealso thumbnail
- The cover frame is the still image representing a video on a profile grid, in search results and on browse surfaces.
- CPMalso cost per mille, cost per thousand impressions
- CPM is what it costs to serve a thousand impressions.
- Creative testing
- Creative testing is running several versions of the same idea to find out which one performs, rather than reasoning about it in advance.
- Cross-posting
- Cross-posting is publishing the same video to more than one platform.
E
- Engagement rate
- Engagement rate is interactions divided by an audience figure, expressed as a percentage.
- Evergreen content
- Evergreen content is material that stays relevant indefinitely, as opposed to content tied to a moment, a trend or a date.
- Explainer video
- An explainer video answers one narrow question completely in under a minute.
F
- Fabricated endorsement
- A fabricated endorsement is a testimonial, review or recommendation from a customer who does not exist or who never said it.
- Faceless video
- Faceless video is short-form content made without a presenter on camera, using voiceover, screen content, stock or generated footage and on-screen text instead.
- Follower conversion rate
- Follower conversion rate is new followers divided by profile visits.
- For You pagealso fyp, recommendation feed
- The For You page is the algorithmically recommended feed that makes up most of short-form consumption.
G
- Green screenalso chroma key
- Green screen is the format where a presenter appears in front of a replaced background, usually a screenshot, headline or chart they are reacting to.
H
- Hashtag
- A hashtag is a keyword prefixed with a hash, used to categorise a post.
- Hook
- The hook is the opening of a short-form video, roughly the first one to three seconds, that decides whether someone keeps watching.
- Hook rate
- Hook rate is the share of people who kept watching past the first few seconds, usually measured at the three-second mark.
I
- Impression share
- Impression share is the proportion of the impressions you were eligible for that you actually received.
- Impressions
- An impression is one delivery of a piece of content to a screen.
L
- Likeness rightsalso right of publicity, image rights
- Likeness rights are a person's legal control over the commercial use of their face, voice and identifiable characteristics.
- Loop
- A loop is a video whose ending leads back into its beginning, so playback continues seamlessly and viewers rewatch without deciding to.
P
- Pacing
- Pacing is how quickly a video moves through its content: shot lengths, speech rate and how long each idea is held before the next arrives.
- Pattern interrupt
- A pattern interrupt is a deliberate break in the visual or audio rhythm, used to reset a viewer's attention before it drifts.
- Product demo
- A product demo shows something working rather than describing what it does.
R
- Reach
- Reach is the number of distinct people who saw something at least once.
- Reelalso instagram reel
- A Reel is Instagram's short-form vertical video format, shown in a dedicated feed and in the main feed alongside posts.
- Repurposing
- Repurposing is turning one piece of source material into several posts in different formats.
- Retentionalso audience retention, watch time
- Retention is how much of a video people actually watch, usually shown as a curve from the first second to the last.
- ROASalso return on ad spend
- ROAS is revenue divided by advertising spend.
S
- Safe zone
- The safe zone is the area of a vertical video frame not covered by platform interface elements: the caption, the username, the action buttons and the progress bar.
- Save rate
- Save rate is the share of viewers who bookmarked a video to return to it.
- Search on socialalso social search, in-app search
- Search on social is the growing share of short-form traffic that arrives through a query typed into the app rather than through the recommendation feed.
- Seeding
- Seeding is the initial test distribution a post receives before the platform decides whether to widen it.
- Shadowban
- A shadowban is the claim that a platform has silently suppressed an account's reach without notifying it.
- Share ratealso send rate
- Share rate is the share of viewers who sent a video to someone else or reposted it.
- Short-form video
- Short-form video is vertical video of roughly fifteen to sixty seconds, made for feeds that autoplay and scroll: TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
- Shot listalso storyboard
- A shot list breaks a script into the individual shots that will be filmed or generated, each with a duration.
- Slideshow postalso photo carousel, tiktok slideshow
- A slideshow post is a set of still images shown in sequence, swiped or auto-advanced, with the text carrying the content.
- Subtitlesalso burned-in captions, on-screen text
- Subtitles are the words rendered into the video frame itself, timed to the speech.
- Synthetic mediaalso generated media
- Synthetic media is any image, video or audio produced or materially altered by a generative model rather than captured.
T
- Talking head
- A talking head is a video of a person speaking directly to camera, with the argument carried by what they say rather than by what is shown.
- Testimonial video
- A testimonial video is a customer describing their experience of a product.
- Text to video
- Text to video is generating a video clip from a written description, rather than filming or editing one.
- Trending audioalso trending sound
- Trending audio is a sound clip currently being used widely on a platform.
U
- UGCalso user-generated content
- UGC stands for user-generated content: photos, videos and reviews made by customers and creators rather than by a brand's studio.
- UGC brief
- A UGC brief is the instruction given to a creator: what to make, which claims to hit, what to avoid, and how the result may be used.
- UGC creator
- A UGC creator is someone paid to make creator-style content for a brand to run on the brand's own channels, rather than to post it to their own audience.
- Usage rightsalso licensing, usage terms
- Usage rights define where, for how long and in what contexts a brand may use content it commissioned.
V
- Voiceoveralso vo
- A voiceover is narration recorded separately from the footage and laid over it.
W
- Watch timealso average view duration
- Watch time is the total or average amount of time people spent watching a video, reported in seconds.
- Watermark
- A watermark is a visible mark identifying the tool or platform that produced a video.
- Whitelistingalso creator licensing, spark ads
- Whitelisting is running ads from a creator's own account handle rather than the brand's, with the creator's permission.
The glossary, asked and answered
Can I use these definitions in my own work?
Yes, that's what they're for. Each one is written to stand on its own, so it survives being lifted into a deck or a doc. A link back is appreciated, but we're not going to chase you.
Are these the official definitions?
There's no such thing, and that's half the reason this page exists. Platforms count the same word differently: a view isn't measured at the same point on TikTok as on YouTube, and reach and impressions swap meanings depending on who's reporting them. Where the meaning shifts by platform, the entry says so instead of pretending it doesn't.
Why is a word missing?
Probably on purpose. A term only gets a page when there's something to say beyond the definition: what it's actually for, and the mistake people make with it. If an entry would just restate a dictionary, we skip it. If you think we've skipped wrongly, the contact page reaches a person.
Why not just ask an AI what a word means?
You can, and it'll do fine on the definition. What it won't reliably give you is the pitfall: the way each term gets misused in practice, and the pairs that get swapped for each other. That part comes from watching people get it wrong, and it's the reason each entry exists.
Do the definitions go out of date?
The craft ones barely age; a hook is a hook. The metric and compliance ones can, because platforms rename things and the AI labelling rules have moved twice in two years. When something moves, the entry moves with it.
Where these words get used
A definition is the least useful form of an idea. The use cases are the situations these terms come up in, the tools calculate the metrics defined here, and the blog covers the labelling rules that the compliance entries summarise in a sentence.
Knowing the words is the easy part
Three free videos, no watermark, and no card to start.