What these platforms actually pay, with the receipts
Fees, payout minimums and waiting times, pulled from the company's own pages and dated. If a number here isn't sourced, it doesn't go up.
FIG 1 · EUR/USD / USD
What you must reach before each of these will pay you
The lowest published threshold on each platform we cover, with the method it belongs to. Every figure is that company's own, read off its own page on the date shown there. Nothing is converted between currencies: where a company publishes one number for both, it prints as EUR/USD.
How a one-person shop gets a bot that answers customers from its own shipping, returns and sizing pages: the policies as files, a browser prototype in Google AI Studio, then one API call with the files attached through OpenAI file search, Anthropic prompt caching or Gemini File Search, a fallback message for the 429, and the honest answer on putting it on the website (OpenAI's no-code Agent Builder shuts down November 30, 2026; ChatKit needs your own server). A thousand exchanges cost about a dollar or two; the ceiling on your tier decides whether the 1,001st is answered. Every step read off the providers' own documentation, 13 and 14 September 2026.
How to get a usable 1,500-word first draft for a client out of OpenAI, Claude, Gemini or Mistral: write the brief as the system instruction, run it in a browser (Google AI Studio, Mistral Studio) or with one API request, strip the preamble, do the edit pass, and hand over the file. Then the arithmetic: 1,500 words is about 2,000 tokens, and at published output prices the draft costs between a tenth of a cent and ten cents. Every step read off the providers' own documentation, 13 and 14 September 2026.
Two ways to get a 60-minute recording into a speaker-labelled transcript with the names spelled right, exported as text and SRT: in the browser with ElevenLabs Speech to Text, or with one request to OpenAI's transcription endpoint. Then the ten minutes of editing that make it deliverable, what the hour costs on each route ($0.18 to $0.39 by API, 19,800 credits in the ElevenLabs app), and what a platform pays a person for the same hour. Every step read off the tools' own documentation, 13 and 14 September 2026.
AdSense allows 50 languages and prints no traffic figure. Ezoic now wants 250,000 monthly active users. Monumetric, Raptive and Mediavine count traffic from four or five English-speaking countries before they count yours. Every gate, split and payday read off the network's own page, with the date we read it.
Marketplaces list monetized YouTube channels, Facebook pages and TikTok accounts by the hundred. Twitch, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok each print a clause against selling or transferring an account; YouTube prints a procedure for changing a channel's owner and a rule that the AdSense account behind the money cannot move at all; Kick prints nothing either way. Every clause read on the platform's own page, with the date.
What it takes to unlock money on each platform, what a $5 subscription turns into, where the money can go, and how many days pass between the end of the month and a balance you can spend. Every figure off the three companies' own help pages, with the date we read them.
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Buying traffic instead?
There is a second set of pages here for media buyers: what each ad network pays out at, how it pays, and how often.