Raw view counts are a bad benchmark and I think most of us know it, but we keep reporting them anyway

Something I keep running into and I'm curious how other people handle it, especially anyone doing client work.

A client sends over a competitor video and asks why we aren't doing that. The video has a big view count on a big account. The number is doing all the persuading. Nobody in the conversation is asking whether that video actually outperformed anything, because a large number reads as success on its own.

But a video doing 2M views on a 3M-follower account and a video doing 400k on a 5k-follower account are completely different events. The first one mostly tells you the account has 3M followers. The second one tells you the idea travelled without an audience carrying it, which is the only version that's actually instructive if you're trying to learn what to make.

How I've been trying to handle it:

• Compare a video to the account's own median rather than to other accounts. Something doing 10x its own median is interesting regardless of the absolute number
• Use follower-to-view ratio as a rough filter for whether it reached beyond the existing audience at all
• Weight comments more heavily than likes when judging whether something actually resonated, but adjust for account size, because a 5k account pulling 300 comments is doing something a 3M account pulling 300 comments is not
• Try to rule out anything with spend behind it, which is much harder to detect than it should be

Where I get stuck: there's no clean way to see an account's median without pulling a chunk of their recent posts, and native analytics only show you your own. So the benchmarking is manual, it's slow, and it's the first thing that gets dropped when a report is due. Which is exactly how we all end up back at raw view counts.

Two things I'd like other people's take on:

1. Do you actually benchmark against size-adjusted performance, or is that a nice idea that dies on contact with reporting deadlines?

2. Has anyone found a line that works for explaining to a client why the competitor video they're fixated on isn't a useful example? I've tried some version of "that's their audience, not their idea" and it lands maybe half the time.

Interested in whether this is a solved problem for people at bigger shops or whether everyone's improvising.