Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
Noise's per-view pay puts the cost of a video nobody watches on the creator
Noise's seed funds a marketplace where brand campaigns run across thousands of untrained creators at a rate that pays out only on views. The buyer's remaining job is deciding which of those videos to stand behind.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Noise announced a $5.5 million seed led by Capital Midwest, M25 and Girshin Robotics on Wednesday, taking its total raise to $7.2 million, with CapitalizeVC and operators from DoorDash also in the round.
- Creators pick campaigns from the app and post to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube, and Noise pays them per view rather than a flat fee, with no follower minimum to sign up.
- The company says 1.5 million creators are on the platform, which Diego Kafie, Stu Feldt and Nic Weber launched in 2025 after two years building a mobile game app called Playbite.
- A newly launched Organic-to-Ads program lets brands take videos made by Noise creators and run them as paid ads on Meta and TikTok on top of the creators' own posts.
- Asked whether the model pays creators less than a direct brand deal would, Kafie said brands name their rates and creators can decide whether to say yes or no.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost Paying on delivered views moves the variance in campaign performance onto the least capitalised party in the deal: a video that flops costs the brand almost nothing and costs the creator the shoot.
- decision The buying question for a growth marketer changes from which influencer to book to how many videos the team can actually watch and approve each week.
- capability A brand can now put media budget behind the clips that already performed, so the campaign doubles as a creative pipeline for Meta and TikTok buying.
- exposure A brand scaling to several thousand creators owns whatever those creators say about its product, having supplied only the brief and the budget.
Per-view pricing decides who absorbs the cost of a video nobody watches. Brands post a content brief and a budget, and Noise handles the sourcing, the one-by-one client relationships and the payments, so a campaign can run across thousands of creators at once [4]. Kafie said the platform takes its fee from what brands pay creators once views are delivered [5].
Kafie said the top creators make more than six figures a year [7]. TechCrunch did not report a median or a per-view rate, and the top of the pool is a poor guide to what an ordinary campaign pays. The seed is $5.5 million of a $7.2 million total, so roughly $1.7 million came in before this round [1]. The new money goes to product capabilities and hiring [19].
Many of Noise's customers are mobile apps working with startup budgets that want influencer marketing, and Kafie said the goal is one day to work with companies of all sizes [9]. The founders arrived at the idea through Playbite, where they taught their own gamers to post. "We started with five, ten, 25, then 100 people," Kafie said [12]. "Had we gone to established creators with big followings and clout, their rates would've been cost-prohibitive for our scrappy startup budget," he said [11].
"Our top brands work with several thousand creators on autopilot," Kafie said [8]. Autopilot covers the sourcing and the payouts. What lands on a marketing team is the review: several thousand people describing your product in their own words, on their own accounts. Noise's screen for that is training. New creators take its modules, can access only certain campaigns at first, and see higher-paid opportunities as they complete more training and get hired more often [16].
Whether this fits a budget turns on what the spend is buying. A per-view rate pays out on the clips that travel, and a brand that needs usable creative for channels it already buys is really buying the Organic-to-Ads path [13]. Then there is capacity. How many videos one person can watch in a week is what caps the campaign.
The supply of willing creators is large. TechCrunch reports that 57% of young people and a little over 40% of U.S. adults overall now want to take part in the influencer market [17]. Noise competes for them with other creator infrastructure companies including Billo and JoinBrands [18].
What to watch
- Whether Noise publishes a per-view rate or median creator earnings, the numbers a brand needs to compare this against buying Meta ads directly.
- How Noise counts views and verifies payouts, described publicly, as brands run several thousand creators at once.
- Whether the customer base moves past mobile apps toward the companies of all sizes Kafie named as the goal.