Views are not the product

Open any short-form app as a creator and the first number it shows you is views. It is on the thumbnail, on the profile, in the notification. It is the metric the platform has decided you care about.

There is a reason for that, and it is not your reason. Views are the unit the platform sells. They are also the number it can produce most reliably, because it fully controls both ends of the measurement. Nothing about that makes views the number that predicts whether you will still be trading next year.

The two-peak problem

Almost every account that posts consistently eventually produces a chart with two peaks. One is much larger than the other. The larger one came from something broad -- a format that travels, a topic with mass appeal, a hook that works on anyone. The smaller one came from something specific.

If you rank by views, you learn to make more of the first kind. This is usually the wrong lesson. Broad reach recruits an audience selected for finding your content entertaining, which is a different population from the one selected for having the problem you charge money to solve. Those two groups overlap, but not nearly as much as a view count implies.

Why this is hard to notice

The feedback loop on views is immediate and the feedback loop on revenue is not. A video's view count is legible within hours. Whether it produced customers may not be clear for a fortnight, by which point you have posted twenty more times and the causal thread is gone.

So the fast signal trains you and the slow signal does not. This is not a discipline failure. It is what happens when one number is delivered to your phone and the other requires a join between two systems that do not talk to each other.

What replaces it

Not a different vanity metric. Engagement rate, saves and shares are all still measurements of the content as content. The replacement is a join: this post, that customer. It requires exactly one thing the platforms do not provide, which is a destination specific enough to identify the post that sent someone.

Once that join exists the ranking changes, often dramatically. The video you were proudest of frequently turns out to have produced an audience that will never buy anything, and a modest one aimed at a narrow problem turns out to have paid for the month.

The uncomfortable part

Ranking by revenue will sometimes tell you that your most popular content is worth less than your least popular content. That is a genuinely unpleasant thing to learn about work you were proud of, and it is the entire value of measuring it.