Thousands of views, almost no clicks — which end is broken?

A few thousand views with single-digit profile visits is a stranger result than either zero views or a normal click rate. Something is working and something isn't, and I can't tell which end.

Numbers from the last seven days on a short-video account: a few thousand video views, four profile visits, zero comments, zero shares. On a longer-form channel over four weeks: five thousand views, four and a half hours of watch time, one new subscriber. People are being served it and they're watching it. They just don't do anything afterwards.

Three explanations, and I've argued myself into each of them.

The copy is the problem. My captions are written to sound like a person instead of an ad, and I think they've ended up so soft that they never actually ask for anything. Testing this means writing harder captions, which risks the reach that currently works.

The format is the problem. Short video is built to send people to the next video, not out of the app. If that's true then view count is a vanity metric for what I'm doing, and the hours should go somewhere that allows an outbound link in the body.

The thing itself is the problem. People watch, understand it, and decide they don't need it. That's the one I'd rather not be true, and it's the only one a better caption can't fix.

What I can't measure is which. A view that ends in a shrug and a view that ends in real interest but no click look identical in the dashboard. The one signal that would separate them is comments, and there are none.

If you've had a post do numbers with no downstream effect at all — did you ever find anything that told you which of the three it was?