Over the past few months, I’ve talked to 10+ YouTube scriptwriters (there’s about 20 of us in total).

And a trend that I’ve noticed is one that I’d never think that I’d see:

Most writers charge on a per word basis.

Some of them will charge $0.07 USD per word.

And others on the higher end charge $0.13 per word.

Which on average would come up to $300-$600 per script.

While this isn’t a terrible model to sell scripts, it often runs into the problem of asymmetric information.

In economics, asymmetric information refers to one party having more information than the other, leading to a distortion of incentives and ultimately market failure.

What that means is that in this case, the person buying scripts (client) will typically have less knowledge about what a good script looks like, while the writer will have more information about what it takes to make a good script.

Some writers will hence make the scripts longer than they need to be so that they can hit a word limit.

Either that or inflate the word count of the script to get paid more.

An additional paragraph here, an additional paragraph there.

And the script becomes inefficient compared to what it could be.

So when any beginner scriptwriter comes to me - my advice is to always charge on a per project basis.

For me, a client could come to me requesting a 10-min script.

But if the script ends up performing better as a 20-min video, I write it as such.

Similarly, if it is better as a 7-min script, I write it as such.

Incentives don’t get distorted.

And everyone is happy because at the end of the day, we’re writing the scripts with the purpose of going viral, not to hit a word count.

Hope this helps,

Bryan

P.S. If you’re an educational channel with a business doing >$100k/m, and you want me to take all the stress off your hands and write your scripts for you,

Respond to this email with “Script” and I’ll write your first script FREE.

Chow.