Login

u/Material_Box2394

▲ 23 r/influencermarketing+1 crossposts

I talked to 100+ creators about how they actually make money. The business side is way more broken than I expected.

I don't think most people understand how broken the monetization side of being a creator actually is. Even creators themselves just accept it as normal because they've never seen it work differently.

Quick background: I co-founded a SaaS in the creator space. Over the last year I've had over 100 conversations with creators across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and podcasting trying to deeply understand the operational side of their business. What I found was consistently worse than I expected.

What making money as a creator actually looks like day to day

Doesn't matter if you're doing UGC, sponsored posts, YouTube integrations or podcast deals. If brand partnerships are part of your income, and for most creators they're around 70% of total income, your week looks something like this.

You need to find brands actively spending on creator marketing right now. Not brands that exist, brands with live budget. Then you need the right person at that company, not the intern running their Twitter, the actual partnerships lead who can sign off on spend. Then you write a pitch personalized enough to not get deleted immediately. Then you follow up. Then you follow up again because 80% of deals close on follow up and almost nobody does it. Then you negotiate rates. Then you go back and forth on contract terms covering usage rights, exclusivity and payment timelines. Then you deliver. Then you chase the invoice because net-30 became net-60 became "let me check with accounting."

Now multiply that by 15 to 30 brands at various stages simultaneously.

The money is genuinely there. A creator with 50k followers in a solid niche can charge $250 to $3,000 per sponsored post. UGC creators charge $150 to $500 per video and do volume. Close 3 to 4 deals a month or crank out 15 to 20 UGC videos and you're at $3k to $12k a month. The problem is the operational cost of actually capturing it.

One creator I spoke to spends 60% of her working hours on deal admin and 40% creating content. She's not unusual. I heard that ratio over and over. Fifteen to twenty hours a week finding brands, writing emails, tracking conversations, chasing payments. A part time job that produces zero content.

The part that should make you angry

Every week you don't do outreach is 4 to 8 weeks of lost income downstream. That's how long deals take from first pitch to signed contract. The week you were too busy filming to send pitches? You'll feel it two months from now.

And it compounds in the worst way. You close two deals in January because you pitched hard in November. February you're heads down delivering so outreach drops. Now April is empty. April you panic pitch but those deals won't close until June. This feast and famine cycle is the default state for almost every mid-tier creator and most of them think it's just how it works.

It's not. It's an infrastructure problem.

What the creators who figured it out actually do differently

These patterns came up consistently across the creators who had solved the operational side.

Follow up relentlessly. Four touches: initial pitch, value-add follow up on day 3, case study on day 7, final check in on day 14. This alone is probably worth more than everything else in this post. Most creators send one email and wait. That's not outreach, that's a lottery ticket.

Bundle deliverables. Instead of $2,000 for one Reel, quote $3,500 for one Reel plus three Stories plus 60 day usage rights. 40 to 60% more revenue and the brand feels like they're getting more value. Works for UGC creators too. Brands love buying in bulk.

Usage rights are the most underpriced thing in this industry. Brand wants to run your content as a paid ad? 50 to 100% on top of your base rate, every time. Always define platform, scope and duration in the contract.

Your media kit matters more than your follower count. Audience demographics, engagement by format, two to three case studies with real numbers. "Fitness creator, 78% women aged 25 to 34 in the US, 4.2% engagement rate" gets responses. "Lifestyle creator 80k followers" gets deleted.

Seasonality is predictable. January to February is prime outreach season when new budgets drop. July to August is dead. October to December pays the most because of holiday spend and Q4 budgets that need to be used. Plan outreach 6 to 8 weeks before you want money in your account.

Brands score you internally and speed of response is a bigger factor than most creators realize. One marketing manager told me they go with whoever responds first when comparing similar options. Being professional and fast is a genuine competitive advantage in a space where most creators are slow and disorganized.

The numbers that should be a bigger conversation

62% of creators report burnout. 69% report financial instability. 37% have seriously considered quitting. The primary driver isn't content fatigue, it's the admin grind around monetization. The business side of being a creator is pushing people out of the industry while brands are spending more on creator marketing than ever.

Every creator I spoke to said some version of the same thing: "I know what I need to do, I just don't have the hours to do it consistently." That's not a knowledge gap. It's a capacity gap.

For the content and trend research side of this, the part where creators figure out what to make before worrying about who to sell it to, we built Social Hunt specifically to solve that. It surfaces what's gaining traction in your niche before it peaks so you're creating around real demand instead of guessing. Solves a different part of the problem but an equally important one.

Happy to answer questions on creator economics, the operational side or anything from the 100+ calls.

DMs are open. Social Hunt

u/Material_Box2394 — 17 hours ago
▲ 1 r/SmallYoutubers

ChatGPT prompts to write actually good YouTube scripts (copy and paste these)

Prompt 1: For generating your outline first

Use this before you write anything. Gets you a full skeleton to work from.

"You are a master at YouTube script writing and keeping viewers engaged without boring them. I'm working on a YouTube script for a video titled [paste your title here]. I need a complete skeleton structure with every point included. For each point tell me: what should be covered, what the viewer expects in terms of information and presentation, and how it should flow. Include examples for each point that show me how to write it myself in a natural conversational tone. If any point needs a reference, stat, study result, or fact to back it up, include that in the point itself not at the end. Write the full skeleton with examples for every section."

Once you have the outline, use this for the intro:

"Write an intro for this video that works like a hype man. Follow this framework: Hook, Shock, Validate, Tease. Don't use those as headings. Write it in a conversational tone like you're talking to a friend and getting them excited about something. Keep it simple and natural. The only job of this intro is to get people invested enough to keep watching. Write it in narration format."

Then for each section of the body:

"Start writing the body of this script. Write the [paste the first point from your outline] section in complete detail following the skeleton structure above."

Repeat that last prompt for every point and you'll have a full script. Read it through after and change anything that sounds off, fix transitions, and make it actually sound like you. Fact check anything it cites.

Prompt 2: Full script in one go

If you want the whole thing at once use this.

"You are a professional YouTube script writer. I'm working on a video titled [paste title] and I need a 2000 word script.

Follow this structure: Hook (3 to 15 seconds) then Intro (15 to 30 seconds) then Body then Problem or Challenge then Development then Key Moment then Summary then Call to Action (10 seconds max).

Hook rules: never open with 'hi guys welcome back.' Use one of these three instead.

Direct hook: call out a specific person or problem. Not 'are you someone who needs help?' but 'are you a creator stuck under 1000 subscribers after six months of posting?'

Controversy hook: say something that creates a reaction but back it up. Not 'here's why consistency matters' but 'here's why posting every day is actually hurting your growth.'

Negative hook: lead with what not to do. Not 'here's how to write a good hook' but 'never open your videos like this.'

Intro should tell viewers exactly what's in the video and set up an open loop that makes them want to stay.

Body is the bulk. Use storytelling, be informative, don't go off topic. Include everything someone needs to actually understand this subject.

CTA at the end is one sentence max. Either subscribe or watch the next video. Pick one, not both.

Write in a human tone. Be conversational, occasionally funny, use real examples and analogies. Avoid 'welcome back', 'folks', 'embarking', 'enchanting' and anything that sounds like an AI wrote it. Use simple words, nothing a non-native speaker would struggle with.

No stage directions, no action cues, no labels like 'Hook' or 'Intro' in the actual script. Just the script I can read straight through.

Write the full 2000 words."

A lot of people DMed me after my last post asking where to even start with finding what to make videos about before they get to the scripting stage. That's honestly where most people get stuck first. I've been pointing them toward Social Hunt for that part because it tracks what's actually gaining traction in your niche before it peaks and can generate script ideas based on what's already working. Way faster than trying to figure out topics from scratch and then using these prompts to write the actual script once you know what you're making.

Drop any questions below, happy to help.

reddit.com
u/Material_Box2394 — 3 days ago
▲ 1 r/ArtificialNtelligence

That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.

So far:

Templates helped

Better filtering helped

Recently testing AI tools (Accio Work) to speed up early stages

Still optimizing.

What’s one change that made the biggest difference for you?

reddit.com
u/Material_Box2394 — 6 days ago
▲ 14 r/dropshipping

how long are you spending on supplier research before you pull the trigger on a product?

So I've been doing product research the old fashioned way for a while now just manually digging through Alibaba listings, cross referencing reviews, the whole thing. It's tedious but I know what I'm looking for. A few days ago I decided to try this AI sourcing tool called Accio, it's actually made by Alibaba so it's tied into their ecosystem. Figured I'd give it a real shot instead of just clicking around for five minutes and writing it off. Honestly it was more useful than I expected for the boring early stage stuff like when you have a vague product idea and don't really know the right keywords yet, it kind of helps you narrow things down faster. But I still ended up doing a bunch of manual verification afterward anyway because I just don't trust AI to catch the sketchy suppliers. It missed some things I would've flagged immediately. So it's not like it replaced anything, it just made the first hour of research less annoying. Not sure if that's worth building a habit around or not. Anyone else messing around with AI for sourcing or are you still doing it all by hand?

reddit.com
u/Material_Box2394 — 6 days ago