Lesson 3 of 11 · The market
How do you read a clipping campaign?
Five fields are printed where you can see them. Four more decide whether you get paid, and they are usually further down the page than anyone scrolls.
6 min readFigures re-read from every live campaign we cover. Last updated 2026-08-28.
Four numbers, and one of them is doing the work
Every campaign listing shows you the same four things at the top: what it pays per 1,000 views, how big the budget is, how much of that budget is left, and how long it has to run. Three of them are advertising. The fourth is the one that decides whether you should open the editor.
Budget left is the fourth, and it is the only one of the four that changes while you are reading. A campaign is not a job that exists until its deadline; it is a pot that empties, and the deadline is just the latest it can possibly last. Most good campaigns never reach theirs.
The arithmetic that tells you whether to bother
Divide the budget left by the rate and multiply by a thousand. That is how many more views the campaign can pay for, across everybody clipping it, before it stops.
What that buys, at — per 1,000:
—
Shared between everybody clipping it — not yours. Ask whether your niche could produce that many this week.
Now ask the question that follows: how many people are already clipping this, and how many views will they land in the next few days? If the answer is plausibly larger than the number you just worked out, you are editing for a pot that will be empty when your views arrive.
This is why ClipRadar prints the remaining budget on every row rather than the headline figure alone. The headline budget tells you how serious the campaign was when it opened. The remaining one tells you whether it is still a campaign.
Time left is not the same as budget left
Two campaigns can both say “12 days remaining” and be completely different propositions: one with most of its pot intact, one down to the last few per cent and running purely on the calendar. The second will stop paying long before its date, and nothing on the page will announce that it has.
Read them together, always, in that order: budget left first, then the date as a ceiling on it.
Those five are the ones the page wants you to read. The four that decide whether the work you are about to do earns anything are somewhere else entirely.
The rest of this lesson
Free account, and you can read the rest
Not a trial and not a card — an account. It opens the whole course, all 11 lessons, and it also gets you into the board the figures here are measured from: campaigns you can claim today, and a fresh pick every day.
Next lesson
Which niche should you clip?Pick something you would watch anyway — you are about to watch a great deal of it. Then check what it pays, because the spread between niches is wider than most people expect.