Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
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.
Leave the preheader empty and every inbox fills it from the first text in your email — usually a link nobody clicks. It is the cheapest fix in email marketing.
Gmail on a desktop gives a subject line about 340 pixels — the tightest surface in email. A phone gives more. The count that matters is a width, not a character total.
Google gives a desktop snippet two lines and a phone three. The useful target is one clear promise inside about 155 characters — and Google may still use a passage instead.
A title tag is cut by width, not by character count. The desktop column is about 600 pixels — which is anywhere from 45 to 75 characters depending on the letters.
A search snippet is assembled, not published. Google picks the title, often rewrites it, chooses the description from the page, and cuts both to fit a fixed column.
Alt text is read by people, not just crawlers. Where each platform hides the field, what a good description does, and why reused images lose theirs.
The picture rendered fine when you pasted it and is a broken icon now. The expiry was in the URL the whole time — here is how to read it.