u/BarkleyBark

Source (Tumblr)

Hey, I’m Whitney :) I wanted to share my experience with UGC because when I started I had literally no idea what I was doing.

I originally got into it because I wanted a way to make some extra money for college expenses without having to pick up another fixed-hours job.

I already spent way too much time on Tiktok anyway, so I figured making videos for brands/apps might be worth trying. At first it was pretty normal. I’d get small campaigns, make a couple videos, get paid $100-150 here and there. Nothing life changing, but it was enough to cover random expenses and I liked making the content. Then I applied to a campaign that worked a little differently.

Instead of just paying a flat amount for the video, they also paid based on performance/CPM, basically depending on how many views the content got.

The video was for an app and I was literally just talking while playing with slime in my hands because I wanted something going on visually while I was speaking lol.

I posted it and didn’t think much of it, I checked later and it was at like 50k views, then 200k, then it crossed 1M and just kept moving.

By the end it got around 4.6M views, and because the deal was performance-based I ended up making around $2k from that campaign.

The video itself was probably simpler than half the stuff I had spent hours editing before ahahaha.

That was around 3 months ago, and after that video I kept doing more campaigns.

Since then I’ve had 2 other videos go over 1M views, which was probably even more exciting because it made me feel like the first one wasn’t just a completely random lucky hit.

Now I’m trying to understand better what actually makes people stop scrolling instead of just focusing on making something that looks nice.

This is my portfolio if anyone wants to take a look: https://app.sideshift.app/portfolio/dSvVb5Ej9JeAWDG8JH1hguoB95t2

I’m still learning, so if anyone here has more experience with UGC I’d love some feedback on my portfolio/content.