It's the number I get asked about most. I don't have a benchmark I'd trust, so here are the numbers from channels I've worked on instead, each with the date it comes from.
By Aditya Vora · 5 October 2026 · Pune, India
People ask me what a good retention rate is for a Short. When someone quotes you an industry figure, ask whose channels it came from. Mostly nobody can say. What I can give you is six years of numbers from my own work, with dates on them, and the way I'd use them on your channel.
In YouTube Studio it's average percentage viewed: how much of a Short the average viewer watched. On Shorts it can go past 100%, because a rewatch counts. Instagram gives you average watch time for a Reel instead of a percentage, so divide it by the length of the Reel to get the same number.
Studio also shows how many people chose to watch a Short and how many swiped away. That figure is about the opening. Retention is about everything after it, and the two need different fixes.
On Ankur Warikoo's finance channel, 1,313 Shorts averaged 85.1% retention and pulled 2 billion views. That is a team number. Shaurya Shikhar carried the content and data side and the channel is Ankur's. My part is the craft layer: how a clip gets put together so people stay to the end. I've written about who did what on that run.
August 2023 was my best month at the time: 75% average retention across thirty Shorts, and 1.9 million views. August 2025 was the same shape of month at 86% across thirty Shorts and 4.4 million views, and by then it was an ordinary month. The weakest Short that month held 74%. The strongest came in at 102%, because enough people watched it twice.
Autofy is a car content brand with a much smaller audience. In the first month I worked with them, March into April 2026, their YouTube retention went from 47% to 61%. The full numbers are on my writing page, along with a warning about how flattering percentages look on a small base.
Compare a Short with your own channel before you compare it with anyone else's. A finance channel with millions of subscribers and a car brand in its first months are not playing the same game, and 61% was a real result for Autofy. Work out your median and study every Short that beats it.
The median moves slowly. Getting from 75% being my best month to 86% being an average one took more than 600 days and more than 600 Shorts. One Short at 100% is nice. A higher median is what compounds.
Retention and reach tend to move together. When something is easy to keep watching, people stay longer and the platform shows it to more of them. Between those two Augusts, average retention went up eleven points and monthly views more than doubled.
Open the retention graph, not the average. The average tells you something went wrong and the graph tells you where. I look at three things: how the opening seconds land, where people leave, and which formats are quietly carrying the channel. After six years of this you can usually tell inside the first three seconds whether a Short will hold.
Then go back through your last few months and sort by retention, not views. When I did this for Autofy, the useful signal was which Shorts held, which Reels got shared and which carousels got saved. It wasn't the posts that felt good to make. Anything that couldn't hold attention got reworked or dropped.
The smallest thing I sell is a retention teardown. You send three Shorts and their retention graphs, I study them, and then I show you where viewers leave and how I'd cut the same footage so they stay. It's $120, £95, €110 or A$180 if you're outside India, and ₹4,999 in India. If your whole channel feels stuck, the FAQ covers when a full audit makes more sense.