Ludwig Ahgren had a blunt lesson for a Streamer University participant this week. During a teaching session at the event, Ludwig looked at one creator’s setup and called it out. The creator was paying a video editor around $40,000 a year for roughly 58 hours of work per week.
Ludwig’s message was simple: that isn’t enough. He argued that creators who want long hours, tight deadlines, and polished videos need to pay their editors properly. You can’t expect someone to treat the job as a real career on that kind of money.
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Ludwig offered an alternative for creators who can’t afford a big fixed salary. Give the editor a cut of the revenue the videos bring in.
The logic is clean. If a video does well, the editor earns more. It also gives the editor a real reason to sharpen pacing, storytelling, and retention. When the channel wins, everyone wins.
He wasn’t suggesting editors get half the brand or an equal ownership stake. It was a practical fix for creators who demand heavy work but have limited cash upfront.
The math, roughly
At face value, $40,000 across 52 weeks is about $769 per week. Split over 58 hours, that’s around $13.26 an hour before tax.
That number ignores a lot. It doesn’t account for taxes, benefits, software, hardware, or whether the editor is an employee or a contractor. It also depends on where the editor lives, since $40,000 lands very differently in a major US city versus a lower-cost country.
Ludwig knows this world well. He’s built his own operation from a solo streamer into a full production machine with editors and staff, so team costs and retention are daily problems for him.
His bigger point stuck: if you can’t afford the labor, shrink the plan. Edit more yourself, post fewer videos, simplify the format, or split the work across several people. Don’t build a demanding schedule on pay you can’t sustain.
