Rate per 1,000 views

This is the single number that decides whether a campaign is worth entering and how long its pool survives. It is closely related to CPM in advertising, though it runs in the opposite direction: an advertiser pays a CPM to reach people, while a campaign pays this rate to the person who did the reaching.

The arithmetic

Divide the pool by the rate to see how many thousand views the campaign can pay for. A $500 pool at $2.50 per 1,000 covers 200,000 views. The same pool at $1.00 covers half a million. Nothing beyond that gets paid, which is why the ceiling matters as much as the rate.

Working backwards is how a funder should set it. Decide the reach you want, divide the pool by it, and multiply by a thousand. If the answer is under about $0.30, experienced clippers will not take the work.

What a fair rate looks like

• →Below $0.30 per 1,000 — usually ignored; the effort per clip is not covered.
• →$0.50 to $1.50 — workable for content that clips easily and travels well.
• →$2.00 to $3.00 — competitive, and enough to attract careful editors.
• →Above $5.00 — generous, and usually a sign the target views are set too low for the pool.

Why it is quoted per thousand

Per-view figures would be unreadable — $0.0025 rather than $2.50 — and per-million would hide the difference between campaigns. A thousand views is also roughly the scale at which a clip stops being noise, so it is a natural unit for both sides to reason in.