Metric

What is Share rate?

Also called Send rate.

In one sentence

Share rate is the share of viewers who sent a video to someone else or reposted it. It is the closest thing short-form has to a direct measure of whether content spreads on its own.

Explanation

Shares matter disproportionately because each one is a distribution event rather than only a signal: the video reaches a new person through a route the platform did not choose. That is why content designed to be sent to a specific person, the this is so you videos, outperforms its raw view count so consistently.

It is worth separating sends, which are private and go to one person, from reposts, which are public. Sends indicate the content is useful or funny to a particular relationship. Reposts indicate somebody was willing to attach their identity to it, which is rarer and worth more.

The common mistake

Reading a low share rate as a quality problem. Plenty of genuinely good content is not shareable, because there is nobody obvious to send it to, and that is a property of the subject rather than the execution.

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