How brands should set a clipping rate

The rate is the one number clippers look at first, and they look at it next to every other campaign on the board. This is how to set it so the right clippers show up, without paying more than you need to.

Start from the board, not from a spreadsheet

Open Discover and look at campaigns in your niche. Their rates are on the cards. That is your market. Clippers open the same board every day and pick the campaigns that pay best for footage they like.

If every campaign in your niche pays around $1 per 1,000 views and you list at $0.60, the clippers who are good will clip for someone else. If you list at $1.20, you get their first hour of the day. The difference on 500,000 views is $300. That is cheap for the difference in who is cutting your footage.

What you are actually buying

Divide your budget by the rate. $5,000 at $1 per 1,000 views is up to 5 million views. At $2 it is 2.5 million. Caps and minimums shave some off that, but it is the right order of magnitude.

Then ask what those views are worth to you. If you know a view is worth a cent, a $1 rate is free money and you should raise it until the good clippers are all on your campaign. If you do not know yet, start with a modest pool at a fair rate and let the first two weeks tell you.

The cap: protect the pool, keep the hitters

The cap is the most one clip can earn. It does two things at once.

It protects the pool. Without a cap, one 5 million view clip on a $1 rate is $5,000, which is your whole budget on one post from one clipper.

It also tells clippers what kind of campaign this is. A $50 cap says "post steadily, do not chase hits." A $500 cap says "if you land one, you get paid for it." The clippers who land hits go where the caps are.

A workable rule: cap between 100 and 500 times the rate. A $1 rate with a $300 cap keeps paying up to 300,000 views, which covers almost every clip and stops the rare monster from eating the pool.

The minimum: keep the queue clean

A minimum payout, the dollar amount a clip has to earn before it enters review, keeps clips nobody saw out of your queue. At a $1 rate, a $1 minimum is 1,000 views and a $5 minimum is 5,000; that range is normal. Set it higher and you lose the clippers whose clips reliably land at 3,000 to 8,000 views, which is where a lot of the volume is.

The fee

The Creators Club charges a 10% platform fee on top of what creators earn. To pay out $5,000 to clippers, fund $5,500. The rate on the card is what the clipper gets in full. Nothing is deducted on their side, which is one reason clippers trust the number.

If you close early, the unspent part comes back to your balance, including the fee on it.

Reading the burn

Once live, watch the pool on your dashboard. Three patterns:

• Burning fast. Clippers found it worth their time. That is the campaign working. Top up, or lower the rate slightly on the next one if you want to stretch it.
• Barely moving. Either the rate is under the board, the footage is dull, or the brief is too strict. Fix the rate first; it is the fastest lever.
• Fast, then flagged. A few clips with sudden jumps that trip the flags. Reject them with a reason and the money stays in the pool. The flags exist for exactly this.

Other models for other goals

Per view is right when you want reach. Two other reward models exist for other goals:

Flat fee per post for hand picked creators when you want control over exactly who posts and what.

Retainer when you want one creator posting every week for a fixed sum across an agreed number of approved posts.

Both live on the same board with the model written on the card.

A worked first campaign

A podcast with a strong host wants reach. The board shows the niche paying $0.80 to $1.20. They list at $1.25 with a $250 cap, a $2 minimum payout, TikTok, Reels and Shorts allowed, and a $3,000 pool, funded as $3,300 with the fee.

Twenty clippers apply in the first week. The brand approves the twelve whose accounts fit. Over three weeks they post around 600 clips. Most earn under $5. Forty earn $20 to $100. Three hit the cap. The pool empties at about 2.6 million views. The brand tops up, keeps the twelve, and raises the cap to $400 because the three cap hitters were the best clips of the month.

The click by click version of that loop is in set your rate and caps.