£8.33
Cost per subscriber
£0.25
Cost per visit
3% converted
£432
Estimated lifetime revenue, after the platform cut
4.32x
Return on spend
break even at 3 subscribers
That campaign generated about £4.32 for every £1 spent. Book it again.
The subscriber lifetime is doing most of the work in this result. A subscriber worth £8 a month is worth £24 over three months and £96 over twelve, so an optimistic lifetime turns a losing campaign into a winning one on paper. Take the figure from your own churn rather than from hope.
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Most promotion is never measured
Creators buy shoutouts, promo slots, ads and collaborations, and then judge them by whether the week felt busy. That is an understandable way to run a business and a terrible way to decide where the next hundred pounds goes. The calculation is not hard, it is just nobody's favourite part of the job.
The output that matters is the return on spend: what came back for every pound that went out. Above one and the promotion paid for itself. Comfortably above two and it survives your estimates turning out to be optimistic, which they will be.
The number doing all the work
Subscriber lifetime. It is the input people are loosest with and it moves the answer more than everything else combined. A subscriber worth eight pounds a month is worth twenty-four over three months and ninety-six over twelve, so choosing a generous lifetime turns a losing campaign into a winning one without anything real having changed.
Take it from your own churn rather than from hope. At twenty percent monthly churn the average subscriber stays about five months, not twelve. If you do not know your churn, the retention calculator will show you what different rates imply.
We also deliberately count tips and PPV once, in the first month, rather than assuming they repeat forever. Compounding a first-month spike across a twelve-month lifetime produces numbers that make every campaign look brilliant, which is how people end up buying the same useless promo slot four times.
Reading the result honestly
- •Break-even subscribers is the most actionable output. If a promo needed eleven subscribers to wash its face and brought three, you do not need a spreadsheet to know what to do next time.
- •A promotion that loses money can still be worth running once, for the data. Running it twice after it lost money is the expensive part.
- •Attribution is imperfect. Some subscribers who arrived that week came from somewhere else, and some who saw the promo subscribe a month later. Treat the number as directional.
- •Cost per subscriber is worth tracking over time across every channel you use. It is the single most useful marketing figure a creator can keep.
The cheapest acquisition is not losing people
Once you have a cost per subscriber, you have a way of pricing everything else. If a new subscriber costs you fifteen pounds to acquire, then every subscriber who cancels because they found your content free elsewhere is fifteen pounds of acquisition you have to spend again. Protection stops being an overhead at that point and starts being a line in the same budget as promotion.
Questions people ask
What counts as a good return?
Anything above one means the promotion paid for itself over the lifetime you assumed. Comfortably above two gives you room for the estimate being optimistic. Below one means it cost more than it brought in, which is worth knowing before you book the same slot again.
Why does subscriber lifetime matter so much?
Because it is doing most of the work in the result. A subscriber worth eight pounds a month is worth twenty-four over three months and ninety-six over twelve. Assume a lifetime you can defend from your own churn figure, not the one that makes the campaign look good.
Does it assume tips keep coming every month?
No, deliberately. Only the subscription recurs across the lifetime. Tips and PPV are counted once, in the first month. Repeating them every month would flatter the result badly over a long lifetime.
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