Getting paid as an editor or clipper
What the work pays, how to price it, what to get in writing, and the four things sitting between a view count and money in your account.
Short answer
Client work and campaign work are two different money systems, and mixing them up is where most of the confusion starts. Client work pays a price you set per deliverable, and it arrives when your written terms say it does, so the terms have to exist before you cut anything. Campaign work pays per thousand verified views, and four things sit between the advertised rate and your balance: a per-clip cap, a minimum view threshold, verified views running below the platform counter, and a pool that may already be spent. All four of those are in the brief, which almost nobody reads before cutting.
Published rate cards are negotiating anchors, not data. The ranges they quote are wide enough that quoting from one tells a client nothing except that you looked it up. Price the deliverable instead, built from what a reel costs you end to end including one revision round, then put the turnaround and the revision count beside the number so it can be defended. The same discipline covers the campaign side, where a screenshot of somebody's four-figure month is the top of a distribution and the replies asking which campaign are asking the wrong question. None of it works without terms in writing first, which in this trade usually means six lines typed into the same chat the client briefed you in, and VALORAE Cast hands people those six lines before their first client rather than after their first loss.