Your retainer is the floor. It covers your rent and it is the least interesting number in your deal. The money that actually changes your month sits in the bonus column, and the bonus column is tied to one thing you can influence every single day: views. Learn to hit view milestones on purpose instead of by luck, and a $300 retainer quietly turns into a $1,200 month.
We run the index that brands search to hire creators directly, so we see both sides of these deals. The structure is almost always the same: a monthly retainer as a base, plus a bonus that scales with how many people a video reaches. The retainer rewards you for showing up. The bonus rewards you for being good. Here is roughly how the rungs pay, and these numbers illustrate the model rather than promise a payout, because the exact figure depends on the brand and the product.
The bonus math is the half you cannot see
Subscribe to read what brands actually pay out per milestone, and how creators clear them every month.
What else you would get
Plus the index itself: 70,000 creators with the rate they charge and an email that works.
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