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Welcome back to Chewbr Tuesday. Issue two.
If you forwarded the first one to another creator like I asked at the end, thank you, you're exactly who this is for. No long introductions this week since you already know who we are, so let's get straight into it.
Creator economyThis week's creator newsThe big story this week is about money, and specifically how much you're charging for yours. A creator posted his first ever sponsorship rate card on Reddit, £700 for a 120 second slot, and a bloke who books these deals for brands replied in public to tell him he was charging less than half of what he should be. Around the same time, a study of 5,000 creators (Italian data, so take it as a direction of travel rather than gospel) found brands have cut what they pay celebrities for the third year running, while creators in the 50k to 300k range actually got a pay rise. The money is quietly sliding down the ladder towards smaller channels, and most of us are still pricing like it's 2023. The rough rule that came out of that thread if a brand ever asks your rate is somewhere around twice your video CPM for an integration. And whatever number you give the first brand is the one every brand after it starts haggling from, so don't lowball yourself out of habit. YouTube also quietly opened its own brand deal marketplace here in the UK this week. It's called Creator Partnerships and it's sitting in your Studio right now, next to a free little series they've put out on how to pitch and price yourself. For years the advice was hit 100k subs and the brands come to you. That's starting to fall apart. There's now a tab that puts you in front of brands who are actively looking, and a channel with 10k subs can be in it. Being findable is starting to count for more than being big, and the people who quietly set their media kit up now, while it's empty and nobody's bothering, are the ones who'll surface first when a brand goes looking. On the more useful side, Studio has grown a proper health dashboard. Every video now gets a colour in a new Notices column, red for blocked, yellow for limited ads, grey for information, and there's a revenue figure per video sat right beside it. If you haven't opened your Content tab in a few weeks, give it two minutes, sort by that column and sort out anything red first. Finding out one of your videos was quietly limited three months ago is a miserable way to lose money you'd already earned. And a good one to finish the news on. Hank Green, about the most trusted name in educational YouTube, put out a video explaining why he turned down the chance to buy TED. 444,000 views in three days for a video about a deal he didn't even do. The bit worth stealing is the way he thinks about it. With any big shiny opportunity, the real question is what your channel has to stop doing in order to take it on. Saying no is a proper skill, and the further you get the more you'll lean on it.
Building ChewbrSneak PeekSame as last week, here's an early look under the bonnet at what we've been building. The main thing we've just opened up is a free workflow audit. It looks at how you actually run your channel and points you to the one phase that's quietly costing you the most, which is the exact problem we started Chewbr to solve. It's early and still a bit rough, so go easy on us. I've explained how it works properly a little further down.
Try thisThis week's testLast week's shrink-your-thumbnail-to-a-stamp test went down really well, so here's another simple one, and this one might stop you celebrating the wrong thing. If a video suddenly takes off miles beyond your usual numbers, don't get excited yet. Open the analytics and look at three things. What's the click through rate, what's the average view duration, and did the likes and comments actually grow along with the views. If you're staring at something daft like a 50% click through rate, an average view of a few seconds on a ten minute video, and almost no likes, that is very rarely a viral moment. It's usually bots, and YouTube tends to quietly wipe those views back off over the following few weeks anyway. Here's why it matters rather than just being a curiosity. Fake views actively work against you. They drag down your average view duration and reset your baseline, so your next genuine upload gets measured against a number that was never real in the first place. A spike you can't explain is worth checking before you frame it.
Tool of the weekThe free workflow auditFull disclosure, this one's ours. We've been building a free workflow audit and it's the thing a lot of you have been asking about, so here's your early go at it. You answer a short set of honest questions about how you actually run your channel, and it scores you across the five phases we keep banging on about, plan, produce, package, post and promote, then tells you which one is quietly costing you the most. It takes about three minutes. Drop your email at the end and it sends you the full written breakdown to work through properly. If something in your process feels off but you can't put your finger on where, this is the fastest way I know to find the leak.
One last thing
Same ask as last week to send you off. This road gets lonely, we all know it, so if any single part of this was useful to you, forward it on to one other creator who'd get something out of it. That's how a newsletter turns into an actual conversation instead of another thing sat unread in an inbox.
See you next Chewsday,
C
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