Typical performance range

Studio draws a grey range behind several charts and calls it typical performance. On the retention graph it is built from your last 10 videos of a similar length, so a curve sitting above the band means this one is holding people better than your recent work of that size. The comparison is against you rather than against YouTube as a whole. That makes it the honest benchmark and also a moving one: a channel whose recent uploads all did badly gets a low band, and a mediocre video can sit above typical while doing nothing special. The question it answers is narrow, comparing this video only against your own recent work of a similar length.