Rate cards and creator earnings

This page explains exactly how a creator's pay is worked out and what that means in dollars, for every league, geography, platform and category the product supports. It uses the founder's decisions of 5 September 2026 (brief sections 45, 46 and 48), which are binding and override every earlier rate card on this site. Section 46 adjusted the Tier 1 and Tier 3 geography bases and the TikTok and YouTube Shorts platform factors; section 48 replaced the ten grouped categories with 21 individual ones. Every number below either comes straight from those decisions or is calculated from the formula, with the arithmetic shown.

Draft v0.1 · Last updated 13 September 2026

This page is internal documentation. Brands never see leagues, factors, rate cards or what a creator is paid; a brand sees expected posts, expected views and the cost per 1,000 views for its budget (and, once posts are live, per platform and per post), plus the platform's 20% share stated plainly on the billing page.

On this page

1. 1. The idea in one paragraph
2. 2. Leagues
3. 3. The four factors
4. 4. The formula, with worked examples
5. 5. What a gig pays
6. 6. Creator earnings matrix
7. 7. What brands pay
8. 8. Where the numbers come from
9. 9. Open questions

1. The idea in one paragraph

A creator is paid per 1,000 real views their post gets, not a flat fee per post. This is called a CPM, short for cost per 1,000 views. Each creator's CPM is set by multiplying four numbers together: where their audience lives, which platform they post on, what category the campaign is in, and which league they are in. The most a single post can earn is the creator's own median views (their normal-sized post) times that CPM. That is the cap, unless the brand has switched on an optional bonus. A post that gets fewer views than the median earns less, in proportion; a post that gets more views than the median earns nothing extra for that post, but the extra views raise the creator's median for the next gig. None of this changes who gets the platform's cut: the platform keeps 20% of every dollar a brand deposits, taken the moment the deposit lands, as described on the Business model page. The 20% is never taken out of a creator's pay; it is taken out of the brand's deposit before any creator pool exists.

2. Leagues

A creator's league is set by their median views: the middle value of their last 90 days of posts on a connected platform, counting at least 10 posts. Below a median of 5,000 views, a creator is not eligible to take gigs on that platform at all. There are eight leagues, and every creator sits in exactly one league per platform they have connected, because their median can differ from platform to platform.

Leagues are recalculated on the 1st of every month, per platform, from each creator's trailing 90-day median. A creator can move up or down a league from one month to the next without doing anything except posting the way they always do; the platform is only checking the number, not the effort behind it.

The league factor barely moves across the whole ladder: 1.00 for the four lowest leagues, 1.05 for the two Gold leagues, 1.10 for Ruby and Diamond. That is deliberate. It means a brand gets roughly the same views for its money whether its gigs go to Bronze creators or Diamond creators; the league factor is not the lever that makes climbing worthwhile. What makes climbing worthwhile is that a higher league comes with a bigger median, and a bigger median times the same kind of CPM is a much bigger paycheck per post (section 6 below shows this in dollars). On top of that, creators in Gold 1 and above get first-wave offers, meaning they see new gigs before lower leagues do, and from Phase 4 onward Diamond creators are offered custom deals outside the standard rate card. Climbing a league is a reward for having a bigger audience, not a reward for a better rate.

3. The four factors

A creator's CPM for a given gig is the product of four factors: a geography base in dollars, and three multipliers for platform, category and league. Each is described below with its own table. A fifth adjustment, the content format, is applied on top of the finished CPM and is explained at the end of this section.

3.1 Geography base

The geography base is set by where the creator's audience lives, not where the creator themselves lives. Creator location is irrelevant to the CPM: a creator's own country or city has no place in the formula anywhere, and there is no city-level targeting in V1 at all (local-visit campaigns and the countries-and-cities filter are moved to "later: local distribution"). What drives the base is the audience's geography tier, read from the platform's own audience insights screen, which shows the countries a creator's followers or viewers are in, not from the creator's profile address. At the two-week MVP this is done by hand: the creator uploads a screenshot of that screen, and ops reads off the countries. A creator's tier is the tier that the majority of their audience falls into. When an audience is split across tiers with no clear majority, the geography base is a weighted average of the tiers involved, weighted by the share of audience in each (assumption).

3.2 Platform

The platform factor reflects how much a view is worth to a brand on each surface. Instagram Reels carries the highest factor, X the lowest.

3.3 Category

The category factor is set by the campaign's category, not by the creator's usual content. A creator who normally posts about food can still take a personal finance gig at that category's factor, if they are matched to it and accept the offer. There are 21 categories. A creator can pick up to 3 of them as their own interests, to shape which gigs they are offered; a campaign always has exactly one category, and that one category sets the factor used in the formula for every gig in that campaign.

Every factor is set relative to Food and cooking, which is fixed at 1.00 and used as the anchor for the whole list. The two tables below give all 21 categories in order from the highest factor to the lowest, split into two tables for readability: the first covers the 11 categories priced above the anchor, the second the 10 categories priced at or below it.

V1 note (founder decision, 14 September 2026): only ten campaign categories are live in the V1 product: AI tools; SaaS and web apps; developer tools; productivity apps; fitness apps; health apps; lifestyle apps; education apps; kids apps; games. All ten are narrower, brand-facing names for the same thing: they all use the "Software, apps and SaaS" factor of 1.6 shown in the table below, and none of the other 20 categories, including Food and cooking, the anchor, can be picked when a V1 brand creates a campaign. The rest of this section, the full 21-category list at every factor, is internal documentation and the roadmap for later, not something a V1 brand ever sees or chooses.

The factors above come from public benchmarks for 2026 (verify against current data). In plain words, that evidence says: personal finance and investing content was paying $18 to $45 per 1,000 views on YouTube, with the top-paying niche on TikTok at $12 to $15; software, app and SaaS content was paying 1.8 to 2.5 times the baseline rate; business and entrepreneurship content was paying $14 to $35; real estate content was paying $12 to $30; education content such as coding and language lessons was consistently paying above average; software review content was paying $12 to $20, well above gadget unboxing content at $5 to $8; beauty and supplement content was paying above baseline on TikTok; general lifestyle content was paying 0.7 to 0.9 times the baseline rate; gaming content was paying $1 to $8; and entertainment and comedy content was paying under $5. Every figure is relative to food and cooking content, fixed at the 1.00 anchor. Where no niche had its own figure, the factor is an assumption based on the nearest niche that does, for example fashion and apparel is assumed close to beauty, and automotive is assumed close to consumer electronics.

3.4 League

The league factor is the same number shown in the leagues table in section 2, repeated here because it is one of the four inputs to the formula.

Format is applied after the four factors have set the CPM for a video post. A slideshow post pays 60% of that CPM; a text post pays 30% of it. A video post pays the full CPM. Formats and their meaning are set out on the Product spec page.

4. The formula, with worked examples

Creator CPM = geography base x platform factor x category factor x league factor. The result is a dollar amount per 1,000 real views, for a video post in that geography, platform, category and league. Three examples from the founder's decision show the arithmetic in full:

• Silver, Tier 1 audience, Instagram Reels, food and cooking: $2.50 x 1.25 x 1.0 x 1.00 = $3.13 per 1,000 views.
• Diamond, Tier 1 audience, Instagram Reels, personal finance and investing: $2.50 x 1.25 x 1.7 x 1.10 = $5.84 per 1,000 views.
• Bronze 1, Tier 4 audience, X, gaming: $0.35 x 0.60 x 0.7 x 1.00 = $0.15 per 1,000 views.

Because Silver 1 and Silver 2 share the same league factor of 1.00, the table below (food and cooking category, factor 1.0) applies to both leagues. It shows all 16 combinations of the four geography tiers and the four platforms.

Every cell is base x platform factor x 1.0 x 1.00. For example, the Tier 3, TikTok cell is $0.65 x 1.00 x 1.0 x 1.00 = $0.65.

5. What a gig pays

Expected earnings for a gig = the creator's median views x their CPM for that gig. This is the number shown to the creator before they accept an offer, alongside the CPM itself. A floor of 20% of expected earnings is released to the creator's wallet as soon as the posted link passes the platform's four checks (public, ad label, campaign hashtag and brand tag, video matches the approved submission), whatever happens next. After that, the platform refreshes the post's view count once a day for the 14 days the post earns; a brand can ask for up to 5 extra refreshes a day per campaign, on any platform. After each refresh, the creator's earnings to date are recalculated as views so far divided by 1,000, times the CPM, minus whatever has already been released; the difference goes to the wallet as Pending, then follows the normal 48-hour hold before becoming Available, and is paid out to the creator's bank account on the 1st of the month, as described on the How it works page.

The maximum a post can earn is capped at expected earnings, that is, the creator's median views times the CPM. This is what "cap at the median" means: a post that overshoots its creator's usual size does not pay more, because the whole point of the median is that it already represents a normal post for that creator. Views beyond the median are not wasted, though: they count toward the creator's next 90-day median, which can move them into a higher league at the next monthly recalculation. A brand can optionally switch on a bonus at campaign creation. With the bonus on, views beyond the median are paid at the same CPM, up to a total of 1.5 times expected earnings. The extra 0.5 times expected earnings is reserved from the creator pool for that gig when it is accepted, and if the bonus is not fully used, whatever is left over returns to the pool when the post stops earning, 14 days after it goes live, the same as earnings a post did not reach.

5.1 Priya's gig

Priya is a Bronze 1 creator with a 10,000 median, posting developer-productivity content on Instagram Reels for an AI tools and SaaS campaign with a US developers audience (Tier 1). Her CPM is $2.50 x 1.25 x 1.6 x 1.00 = $5.00. Expected earnings are 10,000 / 1,000 x $5.00 = $50.00. Her floor at verification is 20% of $50.00 = $10.00. Views refresh once a day; after 14 days her post has 9,000 views, below her 10,000 median, so nothing is capped, and her final earnings are 9,000 / 1,000 x $5.00 = $45.00. The table below shows five of the fourteen daily refreshes; "released to date" is the larger of the floor and earnings to date.

5.2 Marcus's gig

Marcus is a Bronze 1 creator with a 6,000 median, on the same US developers, Reels, AI tools and SaaS campaign as Priya. His CPM is the same $5.00 (the league factor for Bronze 1 is also 1.00). Expected earnings are 6,000 / 1,000 x $5.00 = $30.00. His floor at verification is 20% of $30.00 = $6.00. His post reaches 3,000 views in its 14 days, so his final earnings are 3,000 / 1,000 x $5.00 = $15.00. Again, the intermediate view counts below are illustrative only, chosen to reach the given final total (assumption).

Marcus's day 1 row shows why the floor matters: his earnings to date at that point ($4.50) are below the $6.00 floor already released at verification, so nothing further is released until earnings pass the floor, which happens on day 2. A refresh never releases a negative amount; it releases the larger of zero and the new earnings to date minus what was already released.

6. Creator earnings matrix

The tables below show expected earnings per gig (median views x CPM) at each league's typical median from section 2. They are the dollar answer to "what does a gig actually pay a creator," broken down three ways.

6.1 By league and geography, Instagram Reels, food and cooking

Reading down the Tier 1 column shows what climbing leagues is really worth: expected pay rises from $23.44 at Bronze 1 to $2,578.13 at Diamond, a jump driven almost entirely by the median views getting bigger, since the league factor only moves from 1.00 to 1.10 across the whole table.

6.2 By platform, Tier 1 audience, food and cooking

6.3 By category, Silver 1, Instagram Reels

Silver 1 has a typical median of 20,000 views and a league factor of 1.00, so expected earnings here equal 20 x $2.50 x 1.25 x category factor for Tier 1, and the equivalent for the other tiers.

The same Silver 1 creator, same platform, same audience, can earn $106.25 for a personal finance gig or $37.50 for an entertainment gig, purely because of the category factor. Personal finance and investing and software, apps and SaaS carry the highest category factors of the six shown here; gaming and, lower still, entertainment and comedy carry the lowest.

7. What brands pay

Brands never see a creator's CPM or a creator's earnings. What one gig takes from a brand's fund is (the creator's expected earnings for that gig, plus the running cost of running that gig) divided by 0.8. Running cost is a flat $2.00 per gig at MVP: review $1.00, the payout share $0.15, storage $0.15 and the card fee's share about $0.70 (assumption, retuned once real costs are known). Running cost sits inside the one price a brand sees for a gig; it is never itemised separately, and a brand cannot see the $2.00 as a line item. Dividing by 0.8 grosses that amount back up to a full deposit, because 80% of every dollar deposited becomes the creator pool, out of which both the creator's pay and the gig's running cost are paid, and 20% is the platform's cut, kept whole (section 39 of the brief, expanded on the Business model page). Because running costs come out of the 80% side and never out of the 20% side, the platform's 20% of every deposit is net margin: no split of a deposit, however small the gigs, can cost the platform more than the 20% it already kept. What a brand sees on the planner is the effective CPM: (expected earnings plus $2.00) divided by 0.8, converted to a rate per 1,000 views by dividing by the median views and multiplying by 1,000. The table below applies this to the Silver 1 CPM table from section 4, at Silver 1's typical median of 20,000 views.

For example, the Tier 1, Instagram Reels cell: expected earnings at Silver 1's 20,000 median are 20,000 / 1,000 x $3.13 = $62.50 (a Food and cooking gig, priced at the 1.0 anchor, not Priya's own AI tools and SaaS gig in section 5.1); the gig takes ($62.50 + $2.00) / 0.8 = $80.63 from the fund; spread back over the 20,000 median views, that is $80.63 / 20,000 x 1,000 = $4.03 per 1,000 views, up from $3.91 before the running cost was folded in.

A gig reserves exactly the expected earnings (plus the bonus reserve, if the brand switched the bonus on) from the campaign's creator pool the moment a creator accepts. What that gig takes from the whole fund, the number a brand actually sees drain from its balance, is (that reserved amount plus $2.00 running cost) divided by 0.8, because the platform's 20% is already gone by the time the pool exists. The campaign planner shows brands both the number of gigs a deposit buys and the total expected views those gigs add up to, so a brand is choosing between views, not between creator pay rates it never sees.

Take a $1,000 deposit. The platform keeps 20%, or $200, immediately as revenue. The remaining $800 is the creator pool, and running costs are paid out of that $800 before creators are. If that pool is spent entirely on Bronze 1, Tier 1, Reels, food and cooking gigs at $23.44 expected earnings each, each gig takes ($23.44 + $2.00) / 0.8 = $31.80 from the pool, so $800 buys $800 / $31.80 = about 25.2 gigs, which the planner rounds to about 25 gigs, and 25.2 x 7,500 median views = about 189,000 expected views in total. If the same $800 pool is instead spent entirely on Gold 1 gigs at $246.09 expected earnings each, each gig takes ($246.09 + $2.00) / 0.8 = $310.11 from the pool, so $800 buys $800 / $310.11 = about 2.6 gigs, rounded to about 3 whole gigs, and 3 x 75,000 median views = about 225,000 expected views. This is the nearly-flat league factor at work again: whether a brand's money goes to many small creators or a few large ones, it buys a similar order of views, because the CPM per view barely changes across leagues. It also buys fewer gigs than it would without the running cost, because every gig, large or small, carries the same flat $2.00 before the 0.8 division; small gigs feel this more, since $2.00 is a bigger share of a small gig's take than of a large one's.

Brands do not have to pick a single league by hand. At campaign creation, a brand sets its product, budget, audience and a distribution preference, and never sees a league. The planner turns the preference into a league mix internally: "more posts" spreads the pool across many small gigs (skewed toward lower leagues, more posts, wider reach); "fewer, bigger posts" concentrates the pool on a few large gigs (skewed toward higher leagues, fewer posts, bigger single audiences); "auto" lets the planner mix leagues to balance the two. All three splits draw on the same creator pool and the same effective CPM table; they differ only in how the pool is divided among gigs.

The flat $2.00 running cost raises the effective CPM by the same number of dollars at a given league's typical median, whatever the geography, platform or category, because $2.00 / 0.8 = $2.50 is spread over the same number of views either way. The increase is largest in dollar terms for the smallest medians and smallest for the largest medians, since the same $2.50 is a bigger share of a small league's views.

Across all 640 combinations of geography, platform, category and league, 69% move by less than 10% once the running cost is folded in. The largest moves are in the tiny Tier 3 and Tier 4 Bronze cells: the worst case, Bronze 1, Tier 4 audience, X, gaming, moves from $0.18 to $0.52 per 1,000 views.

8. Where the numbers come from

Every number in the formula, the geography bases, the platform factors, the category factors and the league factors, is an assumption set by the founder, based on public benchmarks for 2026. The Tier 1 and Tier 3 geography bases and the TikTok and YouTube Shorts platform factors were adjusted a second time on 5 September 2026, on top of the first-pass numbers set earlier the same day, once more benchmark evidence came in. In plain words, that evidence says: clipping and UGC campaigns, meaning creators are paid to cut up or make short-form content for a brand, were paying roughly $1 to $5 per 1,000 views; one such platform, Whop, ran a ladder of $1 for basic clipping, $2 for faceless UGC and $3.50 for regular UGC, with live Tier 1 UGC campaigns priced at $3; sponsored-post CPMs for a Tier 1 audience ran $7 to $13 per 1,000 views, Western Europe and Gulf audiences ran $4 to $7, and India and South East Asia audiences ran $1 to $3; Meta's own ad CPMs, a different kind of number but useful as a ceiling, ran $16 to $23 per 1,000 views in the United States, $11.80 in the United Kingdom, $4.20 in Brazil and $1.36 to $2.60 in India; Instagram Reels sponsored CPMs ran 30% to 50% above TikTok's; YouTube Shorts ran below the blended average of the other platforms; and X ran the lowest of all four platforms. Both sets of bases, the ones from section 45 and the adjustment in section 46, were set on 5 September 2026 from this evidence, and the founder has said they are to be re-tuned after the first thirty gigs run on the platform, once real completion and view data exists to check them against. Verify these figures against current data before using them for anything beyond illustration.

9. Open questions

One question that was open is now resolved, and is noted as such below (item 1). Three further questions are unresolved as of this decision, and are listed here rather than answered, because the brief itself leaves them open.

1. Resolved: whether small Bronze league gigs with Tier 3 or Tier 4 audiences could cost the platform more than they earn. What a gig takes from the fund is now (expected earnings plus the $2.00 running cost) divided by 0.8, with the running cost paid from the 80% creator pool before creators are paid, never from the platform's 20%. That means no split of a deposit, however small the gigs, can cost the platform more than the 20% it already kept, whatever the geography, platform or league. Creators still receive exactly their expected earnings. No minimum expected pay per gig is needed, and none is proposed.
2. Whether to let a post earn something for overshooting its median even without a brand bonus is unresolved. One option raised is a small automatic cap above 1.0, for example 1.25 times expected earnings, applied to every post rather than only to posts where a brand has switched the optional bonus on (assumption; not in the founder's decision). This has not been decided and is not part of the current rate card.
3. How often the four factors themselves, geography base, platform, category and league, should be retuned is not set beyond the founder's statement that the 5 September 2026 bases are to be re-tuned after the first thirty gigs. Leagues already recalculate every month by rule, because they are read straight off view data. No calendar date has been fixed for the factor re-tune, only that trigger.
4. Bot traffic is not accounted for in the CPM formula. In Tier 3 and Tier 4 markets, 20% to 30% of views can come from bots rather than real people. Because a gig pays out on the platform's own reported view count, and that count is what the 48-hour hold and the daily refreshes are checked against, a Tier 3 or Tier 4 gig may be paying for views that were never seen by a real person. This matters most for the geography bases, which are already the lowest in the formula for those tiers. Whether the bases should be discounted further to account for bot share, or whether bot views should be filtered before a read, is not decided.