Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
Price on reach times a niche rate times your engagement band — never on followers alone. Quote three numbers: the ask, the fair rate, and the floor you walk away below.
A universal link opens the app when it is installed and the website when it is not. A scheme URI opens the app or does nothing at all — silently.
Some of these identify a person, not a campaign. igshid names the account that shared, mc_eid names the subscriber — and YouTube's t must never be stripped.
Upload 2560×1440. Design for 1546×423 — the window every phone shows, which is 17% of the file. Four devices crop the same image four different ways.
YouTube publishes the categories that limit ads. The opening of a video is weighted hardest, context decides everything, and no word list can see context.
Mid-rolls need eight minutes. Everything after that is editorial: put breaks on cuts you already made, keep them out of the opening, and leave the end screen alone.
RPM = CPM × your monetized playback rate × your revenue share. At a 40% monetized rate, a $14 CPM is a $3 RPM — and unmonetized views cost you more than YouTube's cut.
Spotify publishes album and artist images at 640, 300 and 64 pixels. There is no original behind the 640 — every 'HD Spotify cover art' result is upscaling the same file.
Apple's public directory hands out a 600-pixel copy. The 3000×3000 the publisher submitted is at the same address with one number changed.
Upload a square image of at least 600×600. That is also the largest Twitch stores — and the page only ever publishes the 300, which is why avatars look soft when reused.
Worked from published figures: $4.99 a sub, half to the streamer, a cent a bit. A 180-sub channel with 220 average viewers lands near $1,200 a month before tax.
Four income streams, and Twitch publishes the arithmetic for three of them. Subscriptions, bits, ads and tips — with the split applied, which is the part people forget.