Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
TikTok pays creators from a rewards programme measured per 1,000 qualified views, and the rate depends on far more than view count. Here is the mechanism.
Instagram allows 2,200 characters in a caption and shows about 125 before the fold. Everything that matters has to be in that first line and a half.
Some numbers go up reliably and mean nothing. Here is which creator metrics are vanity metrics, which are real, and what to track instead.
Instagram Story size is 1080x1920, but the top and bottom bands belong to the interface. Here is the usable area and how to design a template once.
The honest answer to how long 1,000 subscribers takes is arithmetic on your own growth rate - not an anecdote from someone who got lucky.
Shorts pay from a shared pool at a 45% creator share, not from watch-page ads at 55%. That structural difference explains everything about Shorts income.
LinkedIn has no documented hashtag limit, but three is where the convention settled. Here is why more looks amateur and what they actually do.
TikTok hashtags work as topic signals, not reach multipliers. Here is how many to use, why specific beats popular, and what actually drives the For You page.
Instagram allows 30 hashtags per post. Using all 30 is not a strategy. Here is the number that works, the mix, and where placement actually matters.
Every vertical feed draws its interface on top of your video. Here are the covered regions per platform, and how to design once for all of them.
An aspect ratio is a shape, not a size. Here is what each ratio is for, how to convert between them, and why cropping down beats scaling up.
Pinterest recommends a 2:3 Pin at 1000x1500. Here is why that ratio wins, what happens to taller Pins, and the title and description limits alongside it.