Hook rate

Hook rate measures whether a video's opening seconds actually stop someone from scrolling past. It is the share of people who saw the video and kept watching past the first few seconds, out of everyone who saw it at all.

A low hook rate means the opening frame or line is not earning attention, whatever the rest of the video does afterward — that is a different problem from a weak middle, and hook rate is what tells the two apart.

Reading it beside hold rate is what separates "the opening did not land" from "the middle lost people" — two different fixes, easy to confuse from the view count alone.

It is worth tracking per format rather than per video, since one video's number says little on its own — the pattern across several attempts at the same opening style is where the signal actually is.

A common mistake is comparing hook rate across formats that naturally differ — a talking-head clip and a fast-cut montage do not earn attention the same way, so the useful comparison is usually within a format, not across every video an account has posted.

A hook rate that looks fine in isolation can still hide a problem: it says the opening earned attention, not that the promise it made was the right one for what followed, which is exactly what reading it beside hold rate is for. A hook rate also drifts as a platform's own algorithm and audience habits shift over months, one more reason to track it against an account's own recent history rather than a number quoted once and remembered indefinitely.

Where it comes from

The term comes from paid-social creative analytics rather than from a platform itself. Motion, a creative-analytics vendor, defines it as three-second video plays divided by impressions.

(3-Second Video Plays ÷ Impressions) × 100 = Hook Rate %

Read the source: Motion — Thumbstop rate / hook rate.