Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
The Endorsement Guides are shorter and clearer than their reputation. Here is what they actually require, which labels the FTC has ruled out, and what trips people up.
This is the one hashtag category that is a matter of published policy rather than rumour. Every network with an inauthentic-engagement rule covers these tags by name.
An emoji is an instruction to draw a picture, and the receiving device decides. Here are the four ways that goes wrong, and which of your emoji are at risk.
Paragraph breaks vanish, hashtags stop matching, emoji arrive as boxes. Four things happen to a caption between your notes app and the feed, and all four are fixable.
A commission is a material connection. The disclosure belongs next to the link, not only in a bio or a pinned comment — and that is where most affiliate posts fail.
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.