Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
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.
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.
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.
Seven platforms let you build a short link from a URL. Five only issue one from their own share sheet. Everything else calling itself a shortener is a redirector.
There is no universal best time to post. Here is how to find yours from your own analytics, and what to do when the audience spans four time zones.
Emoji in captions cost more characters than you think, are announced aloud by screen readers, and render differently on every device. Here is how to use them well.
Title case and sentence case are conventions, not rules, and the styles disagree with each other. Here is what each does and which to pick.
Words per minute speaking varies from 110 to 160 depending on format. Here is how to convert a script to a runtime before you record it.
Readability scores measure sentence and word length, not clarity. Here is what a readability score actually tells you and how to use one sensibly.