Practitioner pattern · Matt Espinoza (Founder of Clover, which sells the cloning, multi-country account and AI search/Reddit seeding services he recommends)
Pay ~$3 a post plus a tiny CPM for copies of winners; pay CPM for experiments
Base-plus-performance deals run as low as $3/post plus $0.30-0.50 CPM
What they did
In their words
Matt Espinoza - The NEW App Content Strategy Dominating in 2026
JosephYou're paying CPM for these campaigns?
Matt EspinozaIt varies. So, some campaigns are performance-based, others are like a pure number of a post uh and number of accounts-based. I would say base plus performance is the best scenario, and the reason why is you can go a lot lower on the performance. And so, we even have campaigns that are doing, let's say, $3 per post, but then you have like .3 .5 CPM. And others are just doing way higher CPM, and they don't care about the base, but they're willing to take the risk. So, I would generally say it depends on the campaign set. If you're doing purely cloned content, I would over-index on base to CPM, but if you're just doing like new experimentations, then you should just use CPMs.
JosephAnd it'll it'll probably be like a high CPM cuz you want to just like find formats that work, and then once you find the formats that work, then you want to pay a lower base uh because you know it's going to work. You don't want to pay high CPM on that. Um and then you pay the yeah. Okay, that makes sense.
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More from this episode
- Make 90% of posts copies of proven winners, changing one small thing each timeCopies get ~20% of the original's views on median; some get 2-6x more
- Repost a 110K-view slideshow on one account with small image changes34K views in 1.5 weeks, about a third of the original
- Copy a rival camera app's best slideshows and swap in your own logo~100K views and ~200 signups in 5 days
- Post your winning videos again from accounts in Spain, Germany and Australia~20% more views per new country added
- Dub a 37M-view video into German and post it from a German accountNo German numbers given; Germany was already their best market outside North America
- Add Canada to your US campaigns, organic or paidAn easy ~20% lift, per the guest
- When a creator video passes a view mark, swap its hook or demo and repost elsewhereNo results given; pitched as 5x testing volume per creator
- Post from many accounts on real phones, 2-3 posts a day each
- Check 2,000 AI prompts, guess their volume from Google, and find the cited pagesPart of a program generating ~150M AI search views across clients
- Comment your own top-20 list in Reddit threads that ChatGPT already citesClaims one cited thread can rank you across 5 prompts and 3 AI engines
Tags: creator-comp, cpm, base-pay