Jay Shankar

8 months ago cluely bought a $375,000 times square billboard. last month we rented the most famous billboard in canada for $5,000. yonge-dundas square. 24 hours. then ran the same $5,000 through content rewards the same day. billboard: 24,311 views content rewards: 64,562,883 views $205 CPM vs $0.06 62 people scanned the QR code from the billboard. the creator campaign drove 11,000 clicks. for every 1 person who scanned, 177 people visited through content rewards. cluely's $375k at that CPM would've gotten them around 1.8 million views. that same budget on content rewards is 6 billion. we counted the billboard views ourselves btw. installed cameras at every angle around the intersection and ran the footage through a vision model with no estimated foot traffic numbers, actual faces counted. and this isn't a one off. in 4 months content rewards has run 2,000+ campaigns and delivered 80 billion views for brands. paid out $13,000,000 to creators. the outdoor ad industry spent decades getting CPMs to $5. creators are doing it for six cents and most brands still haven't noticed. the billboard ran for 24 hours and it's done. the creator clips are still getting views weeks later. that's the difference between both.

i wanna push back on something i've been saying a lot as part of my marketing "paid ads are dead" but honestly, they're not. meta ads still work. google ads still work. for certain objectives, paid is still the right channel but there's a difference between "works" and "scales" paid ads are essentially a dial. turn the budget up, get more impressions. fix it with new creatives when it breaks. but paid has a trust ceiling no matter how good your creative is, the viewer knows someone paid for them to see it. there's a sponsored tag. there's a label. there's a feeling that awareness creates friction between the viewer and the message organic creator content has no ceiling b/c there's no friction when 500 different people post about your product from their personal accounts, there's no ad label. no sponsored tag. no visual cue that money changed hands the viewer processes it as "a lot of people are talking about this" and that perception is manufactured social proof and it's something you can NEVER buy through paid channels you cannot buy the feeling of "everyone is talking about this" that feeling only comes from volume hundreds of creators thousands of clips even ugc videos the algorithm picks it up as organic cultural activity and amplifies it not to mention: a good meta CPM is $20 a good content reward CPM is $0.10 completely different ceilings that's why brands are pouring hundreds of thousands into this model. not bc ads stopped working. they most likely always will but because organic scales in a way that ads never will and as nick said: if you wanna cover all your bases, do both.