Every creator we work with eventually asks the same question: should I be optimising for views or for reach? It's a fair question and the honest answer is uncomfortable: neither, on its own, predicts what TikTok's recommendation engine will do next.
We instrumented this across 14,000 mid-tier creator accounts for ninety days. The metric that consistently led FYP eligibility was the ratio of completed plays to first-second drops — i.e. how aggressively people choose to keep watching past the first beat.
Views without retention is noise. Reach without retention is also noise. Retention with even small reach numbers reliably predicted a follow-up FYP spike within twelve hours.
Practical takeaway: if you're going to invest in views, invest in views on content that can hold the first three seconds. Hooks beat hashtags by a wide margin in our data.