Projected organic impressions
35,907Over 6 months at 3 videos a week
Videos published78 Across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts
Free calculator
What organic reach is actually worth.
This tool answers one question with arithmetic you can check: if you publish on a real cadence, how much reach does that earn, and what would buying the same reach cost in paid media? It models reach and its market price. It does not model revenue, and the honesty note below explains why.
Run your numbers
Your reach, and what it would cost to buy.
Every input below is yours to change. The defaults are conservative on purpose. Move the starting views figure to match what your account already does, and move the CPM to the platform you would actually buy.
3
6 months
300
Default 300. A new founder account with no existing audience usually opens somewhere between 150 and 500 views per video. Set this to what your account does today.
25% per month
Assumption, not a benchmark. Compounding lift once the learning phase ends. Set it to zero to see the flat case.
$7
Cost to buy 1,000 paid impressions. Published 2026 ranges: TikTok $4 to $10, Instagram Reels around $8.67 average, YouTube Shorts around $4. Sources are listed below.
Cost to buy that reach
$251At $7.00 CPM
Same reach at the published range$144 to $359. $4 CPM at the low end, $10 CPM at the high end
Average views per video, final month
732Where the ramp lands, starting from 300
The ramp, month by month
Months 1 and 2 stay flat. Platforms run new accounts through a learning phase before distribution opens up, which is documented week by week in the 90-day posting playbook.
| Month | Avg views per video | Impressions that month | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Month 1 | 300 | 3,900 | 3,900 |
| Month 2 | 300 | 3,900 | 7,800 |
| Month 3 | 375 | 4,875 | 12,675 |
| Month 4 | 469 | 6,094 | 18,769 |
| Month 5 | 586 | 7,617 | 26,386 |
| Month 6 | 732 | 9,521 | 35,907 |
Read this before you quote any number above
This calculator models reach and the market price of reach. It does not project revenue, and no honest tool could. Whether reach turns into pipeline depends on your offer, your price point, your call to action, and your follow-up, none of which live in a slider. Results vary widely, and an audience you already have changes everything: a founder with 50,000 existing followers and a founder starting at zero will not follow the same curve from the same inputs. Treat the output as a planning range, not a forecast.
About the ceiling case
JOLT's documented top result is the Hulk Hogan campaign for Real American Beer: 15 million organic impressions and $1 million in sales across 90 days with zero paid media. That campaign carried Hulk Hogan's pre-existing global fame into every video, so it is a ceiling, not an expectation. A founder without that head start should plan for a longer ramp and smaller opening numbers. We have left it out of the model above for that reason.
Where the CPM figures come from
Every benchmark below is published and dated. Where we could not source a figure, we made it an input you control instead of stating it as fact.
- TikTok paid CPM $4 to $10 (WordStream, updated June 2026)
- Instagram Reels average paid CPM $8.67 (Digital Applied, 2026 Meta benchmarks)
- YouTube Shorts paid CPM around $4, YouTube overall $5 to $10 (Store Growers, 2026)
User-adjustable assumptions, sourced from nothing but your own judgement:
- Starting average views per video
- Monthly lift in average views
- A two-month flat learning phase before the lift starts (2)
This tool prices the return side. For the cost side, the content cost calculator runs DIY hours against a hire, a retainer, and a one-time install over the same kind of window.
Both halves of the question
Reach earned against money spent.
The paid-equivalent figure only means something next to what the work costs. These are the same three paths modelled in the content cost calculator, priced over your window.
| Path | Cost over 6 months | What you are buying |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | 195 of your hours | About 2.5 hours per video across scripting, filming, editing, and posting. Cash cost stays near zero. Calendar cost does not. |
| Hire or retain | $18,000 to $48,000 | Agency retainers run $3,000 to $8,000 a month at typical market rates, and the meter runs as long as the service does. |
| JOLT! Deploy | $15,000 once | A 90-day install. At handover the accounts, the system, and the playbook are yours, with no ongoing retainer. |
Reach and cost are separate quantities. A large paid-equivalent number does not mean you would have spent that money, and it does not mean the organic reach produced the same result paid reach would have. It tells you what the attention you earned trades for on the open market.
Why this tool prices reach and stops there.
The tempting version of this calculator multiplies impressions by a conversion rate and a deal size, then prints a revenue figure. We built it that way first and deleted it. The conversion assumption does all the work, the founder has no way to check it, and the output collapses the moment anyone asks where the number came from.
Reach is different. Impressions are counted by the platform, and the price of an impression is quoted daily by the same platforms selling ad inventory. Multiply one by the other and you get a figure anyone can audit. That is a smaller claim than a revenue projection, and it is one that survives a due diligence question.
Why the model ramps instead of running flat.
A new account does not perform on day one. TikTok pushes each upload to a small test batch first and expands distribution only when retention holds, so early videos read as slow while the system learns what your content is and who wants it. The first two months in the model stay flat for that reason.
After that the model compounds. Back catalogue keeps earning, the algorithm has a profile to work with, and hooks improve with reps. The compounding rate is an input because no published benchmark covers founder accounts specifically. Set it to zero if you want the pessimistic case, and treat the gap between the two runs as your uncertainty.
What a paid CPM does and does not tell you.
CPM is the price of a thousand impressions in an auction. Published 2026 ranges put TikTok at $4 to $10, Instagram Reels near $8.67 on average, and YouTube Shorts around $4. Those numbers move with your targeting, your geography, your season, and your creative, so the calculator gives you the slider rather than picking a flattering point on the curve.
Two caveats worth stating. Paid impressions and organic impressions are not identical goods: paid reach is targeted and bought on demand, organic reach is earned, unevenly distributed, and impossible to schedule. And paid reach stops the day the card stops. The paid-equivalent figure is a price tag on attention, and it is the closest defensible proxy available for what organic reach is worth.
Common questions
Questions founders ask about content ROI.
Run your numbers, then pressure test them.
Book a strategy call and we will go through your inputs line by line: what cadence your calendar can actually hold, what starting views figure is realistic for your account, and what the ramp looks like for your category.
For the week-by-week version of the ramp modelled above, read the 90-day posting playbook which documents the full arc from day 1 to day 90.