Case Studies

Delivery by channel, FANDOM campaigns only. Google counts a watched video as an interaction, so its rate is a view-driven interaction rate rather than a click-through rate; Google recorded 24.2M interactions on FANDOM campaigns against 187,731 actual link clicks across the account on the September 16 pull, and the link clicks are not split by single in the export. Every other channel's CTR and CPC are on real link clicks.

Ad media by channel, each channel in the hue it keeps across every study. The figures are the Spend column of the table below.

This is the only place in these case studies where the singles are compared. Paid figures are campaign-level from the platform exports; creator figures are FUGA; streams are Luminate. Something Special's column moves to its campaign wrap (figures as of September 17, 2026) where the wrap restates a measure on the basis the other two use: ad media and all-in paid, Google and creator cost per view, radio plays and Shazams. Where the wrap measures something differently (Songstats sound usage in place of FUGA, Spotify-only playlist counts, the public YouTube counter in place of YouTube Studio, a narrower Google impression count, a higher Meta click count on the same delivery, Chaotic Good's agency-reported engagement rate, and a FUGA DSP split read on August 29), and for measures the wrap does not restate (Google view rate and completion, Meta cost per result and frequency, owned-post engagement, Laylo, chart entries and press articles), its column keeps the September 15 figure so the row stays like for like. Its chart entries and number ones are that September 15 count, on which Apple Music Pop Vanuatu reached #1; the wrap puts its best Apple Music position at #2. Luminate streams, and the cost per 1,000 streams built on them, are the October 19 Connect export for all three.

Paid impressions

174.2M for FANDOM at a $1.72 CPM; 252.0M across the full program at $1.50 (industry median $7 to $14)

Organic and owned views

60.1M at no media cost: 23.9M TikTok, 22.3M Meta, 13.9M YouTube organic and earned

Audited audience touchpoints

312.2M (paid plus owned; the figure to quote under scrutiny)

Earned creator views

366.5M from 169,500 creator videos (FUGA); 208.6M TikTok sound views on the activity-feed basis

Total attention footprint

678.6M (upper bound; owned posts overlap by roughly 4 to 7%)

Streams

16.5M Luminate-verified (12.1M stream equivalents, 1,848 song sales); 52.7M all-DSP plays on the distributor's RTD reports (12-month)

Paid influencer

20.5M views on 544 posts, 12.0% engagement, $0.0042 per view, $4.24 CPM

Earned press

60 agency placements across 52 outlets, 814.9M combined UVPM (Genius, Forbes twice, Associated Press, Rolling Stone Korea); 90 articles tracked in total

Playlists

493 placements across six DSPs (133 live, 11.7M live follower reach, 34.7M lifetime reach); 64 editorial, 303 listener-made, 34 algorithmic; 150 editorial adds logged; Amazon Music 47 placements with no pitch effort

Charts

350 chart entries, 21 at number one; 277 on Apple Music and iTunes territory charts, 66 on Spotify

Radio

3,917 plays (Songstats, Oct 19), and Something Special at 13,910 Mediabase spins and 12.70M audience impressions (KIIS FM 102.7, Arirang Radio, RRI Indonesia among them)

Shazams

24,348 (distributor RTD reports, 12-month)

Tracked activity

2,090 logged feed events: 992 creator videos, 467 playlist adds, 209 radio plays, 128 chart entries, 67 viral videos over 100K views

Artist ranking

Top 5,000 artists worldwide, top 100 Korean artists, top 50 Korean hip-hop/rap (Chartmetric, July 2026)

Owned audience

Spotify monthly listeners peaked at 952,788 (Spotify for Artists); 13.8K YouTube subscribers; 6,397 Laylo direct-to-fan subscribers; 6,999 Instagram and 5,970 TikTok followers; all built from zero

Revenue

$83K to $138K attributable to date (estimated: streaming royalties, distributor-collected Content ID, $6.0K Shopify merch, app floor), plus roughly $1.53M in earned media value

Tightest lens

$9.48 per 1,000 Luminate streams, counting only the $156.4K of DSP-intent spend

Widest lens

$22.93 per 1,000 Luminate streams, counting all paid media

The caveat

None of those lenses is causal because streams also arrive from editorial, creators, press and ordinary discovery

Marginal cost per 1,000 earned views

Swung 4x between reporting periods, from $1.33 in the week the Something Special video landed (Aug 7 to 15) to $5.26 in a quiet window (Jul 18 to 24)

• Spend around asset drops, not evenly.

  Efficiency jumps when a new video lands and decays between them. That is the clearest pacing finding in the program.

• Followers are owned, listeners are rented.

  In the 18 days after the flights wound down, every follower count rose (TikTok +7.6%, Spotify +4.0%, YouTube +0.8%) while Spotify monthly listeners fell 18.1%. That split, close to 29,000 durable followers against 389,000 active listeners, is now measurable and it changes how I describe the asset. By Oct 19 the split held: Spotify followers rose another 5.4% while the listener measure kept falling.

• Capture is the leak.

  0.61% of the people reached are owned audience today, and only 6,397 are directly contactable. The loop runs strong from paid through earned distribution and breaks at capture. A capture unit on the highest-traffic surfaces is the cheapest fix available.

• Streams alone never repay media.

  At a $4 blended royalty per 1,000 streams, streaming recoups 17% to 42% of the media depending on the lens. I built the reporting to measure five returns (reach, efficiency, conversion, revenue, owned audience) so the program is judged on everything it produced.

• The audience is in APAC.

  Korea is 28.4% of TikTok viewers and the Philippines 11.8%, against 11.1% for the US. That is the geo plan for the next release.

• Amazon Music is the unpitched win.

  47 placements and 47 editorial adds arrived with no pitch effort or ad budget, which makes it the most under-served DSP relationship in the catalog.