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Payouts

Every tracked video carries a payouts field: an estimate of what the creator earned for that video. This page explains how it's worked out, so you can predict it without running the maths yourself.

The short version:

If you set an eCPM, payouts grow with views — up to a ceiling. If you didn't, payouts are simply your budget.

The two inputs

Payouts is derived from two fields you set yourself:

Field What it means
ecpm What you agreed to pay the creator per 1,000 views. Example: 2.50 means $2.50 per 1,000 views.
budget The maximum you'll pay for this video, regardless of how well it performs.

Set either one on POST /v1/videos/track when you start tracking, or later with PATCH /v1/videos/by-external-id/{external_video_id}.

Any currency. These are plain numbers — the API doesn't convert or interpret them. Pick your organization's currency under Settings → Currency in the dashboard and enter your ecpm and budget as amounts in it. Every figure in this page uses $ purely as a stand-in symbol.

How it's calculated

payouts = min(views × ecpm ÷ 1000, budget)     ← when you set an eCPM
payouts = budget                                 ← when you didn't

That's the whole rule. Two cases, decided by whether you set an ecpm.

Case 1 — you set an ecpm

Payouts grows as views come in, but never passes your budget.

views × ecpm ÷ 1000   ← what the views are worth
payouts = the smaller of that and your budget

Example. ecpm = 2.50, budget = 100, and the video has 10,000 views:

10,000 × 2.50 ÷ 1000  =  $25.00
budget                =  $100.00
payouts               =  $25.00     ← under the cap

At 60,000 views it crosses the cap and stops:

60,000 × 2.50 ÷ 1000  =  $150.00
budget                =  $100.00
payouts               =  $100.00    ← capped

Case 2 — you didn't set an ecpm

Payouts is just your budget, regardless of views.

This is the flat-budget arrangement: the creator is paid a fixed fee, however the video performs. Views don't change the number at all.

Example. No ecpm, budget = 250. The video gets 50 views or 5 million — payouts stays 250.

Watch out: if you set ecpm to 0, it counts as "not set" and you get the flat-budget behaviour. Use null to clear the field instead — 0 and null mean different things here.

No budget set

With no budget, payouts is null. It doesn't mean "paid nothing" — it means no payout has been set up for this video.

Reading the value

payouts comes back as a number on every video response — GET /v1/videos/stats, GET /v1/videos/by-id/{id}, and GET /v1/videos/by-external-id/{id}.

{
  "video_id": "77168374-dd2c-496a-b1ae-3d4944f48ccb",
  "views": 60000,
  "budget": 100,
  "ecpm": 2.5,
  "payouts": 100
}

A few things worth knowing:

  • It's an estimate, not an invoice. It's recalculated from the latest view count each time you call the API, so it moves as views move. It's not a payment record.
  • 0 and null mean different things. null = no payout set. 0 = a real, deliberate zero (for example a budget of 0).
  • It's capped by budget by design. A breakout video won't cost more than you agreed to pay.

The cpm field

The same response includes cpm, the effective cost per 1,000 views actually paid:

cpm = payouts ÷ views × 1000

Where ecpm is what you agreed to pay per 1,000 views, cpm is what you ended up paying per 1,000 views. When a video is under its budget cap, cpm will be lower than ecpm — you got more views than the agreement assumed, so your effective rate went down.

For the example above: 100 ÷ 60,000 × 1000 = $1.67 per 1,000 views, against an agreed ecpm of $2.50.

cpm is null when a video has no views yet.

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