Four Million Views a Month, and What You Are Really Buying

Every creator media kit on your desktop opens the same way. One big number, and a screenshot of a spike cropped so you cannot see the week before or the week after.

Mine has a big number too. On average over four million views a month across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Clapper, still climbing, and 99,584 followers as I write this, which means 100,000 lands in the next few weeks.

You should not care about any of that.

I mean it. Not as false modesty, as math. A view is inventory. It is the shelf, not the sale. If reach alone moved product, every brand that ever bought a billboard on a busy highway would be rich, and the trust problem eating this entire industry would not exist. It does exist. In a Harvard Business Review piece on the state of creator marketing, close to half of consumers surveyed said they figure most influencers are faking it, in a channel now worth roughly 24 billion dollars a year. Over a third believe creators misrepresent the products they hold up to camera.

So the audience is already suspicious before your logo shows up. That is the real starting line. The number on the front of the media kit does nothing about it.

What I sell is the thing that took three and a half years to build, and it is the only part of this transaction you cannot buy with a bigger budget.

The unglamorous version of the growth chart

First month, roughly 20,000 views. I was a Canadian backyard dad in a robe with a bar called Pour Decisions behind the house, doing skits and chasing trends like everybody else with a phone.

The trends were never the thing. Took me a while to see it. What people actually wanted was the point of view. My day. The genuinely weird stuff that happens in an ordinary life in an ordinary neighbourhood. Whether I signed up for it or not, I had become the main character, and that was what they kept showing up for.

Once I understood that, the strategy got simple. Be willing to look stupid in public so somebody else feels less alone in their own life. Make them laugh, make them feel included, and maybe they go do the thing they have been scared of.

Then came the part nobody screenshots. Months where nothing worked. Videos I was certain about that landed at 1,800 views and sat there like a rock. Formats I loved that the audience quietly declined. A stretch in year two where I wondered out loud whether the whole thing was a hobby I was calling a business.

Then it started to stack. Not a rocket, a staircase. A viral one pulls the floor up, the floor holds, you build on the new floor, another one pulls it up again. Four million a month is what a staircase looks like after forty two months of climbing it, and I can tell you exactly which steps were luck and which were work, because I tracked all of it.

Which is the actual point of telling you any of this. I know what my flops look like. I show you the flops. A creator who only has winners is a creator who is not looking.

Seventy plus brands, and the ones I turned down

I have worked with more than 70 brands now and the number keeps moving, some as collabs on my own channels, some as pure UGC where the content goes to the brand and my face never touches their feed. Food, beverage, fitness, home, auto, cannabis, real estate, haunted houses, a wrestling promotion, one crime novel. The portfolio is public and it is not curated to hide anything.

The part that matters more than the count: I have said no. I have cancelled a deal after it was agreed to, because I got the product in my hands and I did not like it and I was not going to stand in my backyard and tell almost 100,000 people I did.

That sounds like a values speech. It is not. It is a performance mechanism, and there is data on it. When the Better Business Bureau's national programs group ran their trust index, the single biggest destroyer of creator credibility was a creator who is not genuine, cited by 80 percent of consumers, with unrealistic lifestyle content close behind. The single biggest builder was honest reviews, including negative ones. And in a more recent read on where trust is heading, three quarters of consumers now say marketing feels performed rather than meant, and a third actively avoid brands whose content looks too polished.

Read that last one again if you have ever asked a creator to reshoot something because it looked too casual.

Every time I say no to a product, the yes gets more valuable. That is the whole asset. My audience knows that when I put something in a video, I actually use it, because they have watched me not do that for three and a half years. You are not renting my reach. You are borrowing a credibility line of credit I have been paying into since 2022.

The Garage Gym example, which is the entire thesis

Forty five weeks now with Garage Gym, out of Amherstburg, Ontario. Videos. Collabs. Podcast appearances. A long unbroken run of stories. Last week's was me hanging off the pull up bar between reps, talking about what 45 weeks has done to a body that is not twenty five anymore.

Not one of those posts is remarkable on its own. Stacked up, they are the one thing a polished sixty second spot can never be, which is believable. Nobody fakes 45 weeks. The story lands because it happened in order, in public, at the speed of an actual life.

The industry version of why that works goes like this.

Almost nobody buys on first contact. The old television rule of thumb was three exposures, and the current digital rule of thumb sits closer to seven, though the more useful insight from that same analysis is about spacing. For brand building, where you are trying to be in someone's head before they are anywhere near a purchase, spreading exposures across a long stretch of time beats cramming them into a burst. Meanwhile if you try to buy that repetition with paid media, you hit fatigue fast. On Meta the widely quoted tipping point is an average frequency around 3.4 before the same creative starts working against you.

So the brand has a problem. It needs many touches to stick, and the paid channel punishes many touches of the same asset.

Forty five weeks from somebody still doing the work solves that, because every touch is a different day, a different format, a different bad joke. A podcast is not a story is not a collab. It cannot fatigue the way one asset running eleven times fatigues. That is why I build things over weeks and months instead of dropping a single video and sending an invoice.

The market has caught up to this, slowly. Creator content run as paid ads outperforms brand made ads by two to three times, moving from one off deals to ongoing licensing cuts CPMs by 30 to 50 percent and can double ROAS, and yet only about a third of brands run an always on creator program. Of the ones that do, nearly all of them rate it as highly effective. Read that gap as your opportunity, because your competitor probably has not.

Showing beats telling, and it is not close

In the pull up story I am not describing gains. I am hanging off a bar.

I came up in software. Twenty five years of it, a company I co founded and sold, and a long stretch running usability testing, which means I have spent an unreasonable number of hours behind glass watching real people try to use something while the team that built it insisted out loud that the instructions were perfectly clear. They were never perfectly clear. People do not read your explanation. They watch what you do and they decide how they feel about it, usually in under two seconds, and then they go find a reason afterward.

Same job now. Better lighting.

That is why my branded work is almost never a person holding a product and listing features. It is the product inside something happening. A sauce arriving at a party like a character. A pita in a safe. A pool robot in the hands of my real pool guy. If you want the long version of why emotion outruns information in a feed, I wrote a whole piece on it, and the underlying evidence is not new or soft. In the IPA effectiveness data that Les Binet and Peter Field analysed across three decades of campaigns, emotional work produced meaningfully more brand effects than rational work and was roughly twice as likely to deliver top tier profit growth over the long run. Their famous 60:40 split says most of your money should go to the emotional brand building side.

Which is a strange thing for a former software guy to be arguing. It stopped being strange to me the first time I watched a usability session where the interface was flawless and the user still bailed, because something about it made them feel dumb.

The algorithm is technology. The person scrolling is psychology. You need both, and most people selling you content only understand one of them, if that.

Yes, I am expensive. The arithmetic on why.

The going rate for UGC has been sanded down to almost nothing. In the 2026 benchmark data, roughly four out of five brand responses put UGC under 500 dollars a video, with most of the volume between 150 and 300. Retainers come in another 15 to 30 percent below that.

I am not in that band and I am not trying to be. My numbers are published on the site instead of hiding behind a discovery call, so you can decide whether to keep reading. Also worth knowing before you shop on price alone: somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of social followers are still estimated to be fake or bot accounts, so a cheap creator with an impressive number is a very common way to buy nothing at all.

What you get at my rate is a different job description. Before I shoot anything I want to look at where the money leaks, which usually is not the ad. It is the landing page, the purchase flow, the four fields nobody needed in the checkout, the fact that your best selling product is invisible to the machines people now ask instead of Google. I will look at your website and your purchase journey with the same eyes I used in a testing lab. I will look at your search position, and increasingly at your AI answer position, which is a separate discipline that most agencies are currently lying to you about. Your Instagram back catalogue is also indexed by Google now, which almost nobody has checked.

Then we test. Organically, cheaply, more than once. One round of testing is not testing, it is a single data point wearing a lab coat. I run variations, find the winner, then try to beat my own winner before a dollar of paid budget goes anywhere.

Cheap content is not cheap. It is just billed differently, later, in the form of a quarter where nothing moved.

My brand might not be your brand, and that is fine

I should be honest about the other side of this.

My channel is goofy. I have worn a grass skirt on the internet. I climb a children's play castle in a speedo for a punchline. The humour lands somewhere past PG and I am not going to sand it down, because the sanding is exactly what would kill the trust I just spent this whole article describing.

Some brands take one look and decide I am not a fit. That is a completely reasonable decision and I would rather you make it now than three weeks into a contract. My audience skews 35 to 54 and heavily North American, which is to say it is mostly adults with mortgages, kids, a garage, and money. If your buyer is a 19 year old in a skincare routine, I am not your guy, and I will tell you that on the first call instead of taking your deposit.

But here is the part people miss. Fit on my channel and fit for your ads are two different questions. I have written and shot UGC for national brands you would recognise, in categories nobody would ever describe as goofy. Medical. Insurance. Serious products with serious compliance people attached to them. None of it looks anything like my feed, and that is the point. Plenty of the work I do never touches my feed at all. You brief it, I write and shoot and deliver it, you run it as your own creative under your own handle, and nobody ever knows a guy in red Crocs made it. That is straight UGC, and if you are trying to figure out whether that model or an agency or a direct hire suits your spend, I laid out the real costs of each.

The craft transfers. The persona is optional.

Fast red flags when you are hiring anybody, including me

• A media kit that leads with reach and never mentions a business outcome
• No flops shown, ever
• Cannot tell you what the goal is beyond "awareness"
• Says yes to every category, including three competing brands in one quarter
• Wants to shoot before anyone has looked at where the traffic lands
• Tests once, calls the winner, stops
• Gets defensive when you ask for the account level analytics instead of a screenshot

What to ask for instead of a view count

I have spent this whole piece telling you not to buy on reach, so it is only fair that I hand you something better to ask for.

Instagram has said out loud what it weights. Across its ranking systems the signals that matter most are watch time, likes per reach, and sends per reach, and of those, private sharing is the strongest indication that a piece of content deserves to travel to people who do not already follow the account. A send carries several times the weight of a like when the platform decides whether to push something to strangers.

Think about what a send actually is. Somebody watched a video with your product in it, then took the extra step of forwarding it privately to a specific person they know, attaching their own name to it. That is not engagement. That is a recommendation happening in a room you will never be allowed into.

It is also a ratio, not a total, which is why it is such a useful thing to ask for. A large account with a weak sends per reach is worse for you than a small one with a strong one, and the number sits right there in the insights panel where anybody can pull it.

So ask. Ask any creator you are considering for sends per reach on their branded work, not on their best organic post. Whether people are willing to put their own name behind your product in a private message is the closest thing this industry has to a trust meter, and almost nobody is showing it to you.

Questions worth asking before you pay anyone

1. What is the goal, in sales or sign ups or bookings, and how will we know if we hit it?
2. What are you tracking on the front end, meaning ad recall, awareness, consideration and purchase intent, not just views?
3. Show me something that failed, and tell me what you changed after.
4. How many rounds of testing before paid budget gets involved?
5. Have you ever turned down a brand, and why?
6. What happens to my checkout, my landing page and my search position while this is running?
7. Is this one post, or is this a relationship measured over quarters?

I answer all seven before you have paid me anything, because that conversation is the actual audition, not the view count.

Four million views a month is what happens when you spend three and a half years refusing to lie to people about a beer. The views are the receipt. The trust is the thing.

Come tell me what you are trying to sell. If I would not use it, I will tell you that too.