You get your first rating. Five stars. Your score reads 46.
That looks broken. It isn't. It's the score working exactly as designed, and understanding why tells you more about how to raise it than any amount of guessing.
It isn't an average
If it were a plain average, one 5★ rating would make you a perfect 100 and you'd rank above someone with forty ratings averaging 4.7.
That would be useless to the brands doing the picking, and unfair to the creators who earned the forty.
So the score is a Bayesian mean: your ratings blended with a prior, scaled to 0–100. In plain terms, everyone starts from an assumed-average creator, and your own ratings pull the number towards your real performance as evidence accumulates.
Two constants drive it:
- A prior mean of 4.3: roughly what a competent delivered job earns
- A prior weight of 5: the prior counts about as much as five ratings
So your first rating is competing with five imaginary average ones. With ten real ratings, yours are doing two-thirds of the work. With forty, the prior barely registers.
This is the same principle as measured vs reported applied to reputation. A number that can be maxed out by one friendly client isn't measuring anything.
Where the ratings come from
Only from brands who booked you, you delivered, and they paid.
That constraint is the whole reason the score is worth anything. It can't be farmed, swapped, bought, or collected from people who merely liked your work. Every point on it is attached to a completed commercial transaction.
It also means a new creator's score is supposed to be modest. It isn't a judgement on your ability. It's an honest statement that there isn't much evidence yet. Which is far more useful to a brand than a 100 that means nothing.
The three dimensions
Each rating scores you on three things, not one:
Quality: the work itself.
Communication: whether you were easy to deal with.
Timeliness: whether you delivered when you said you would.
Most creators optimise entirely for the first. Brands, in my experience of what they actually complain about, are hurt most by the other two. The second and third are far more within your control than the first on any given day.
Managing expectations is, read in this light, a guide to your communication score.
Speciality scores
You also carry a score per speciality, not just an overall one.
This matters for how you get found: a brand searching for a food videographer ranks on your food score, not your general one, once you have at least three ratings in that speciality. Below three the bucket is too thin to be meaningful and your overall score is used instead.
The practical implication is worth sitting with. Three ratings in one speciality is worth more to your discoverability than eight scattered across eight. If you want to be found for a particular kind of work, concentrating your early bookings there is a real strategy, not just a positioning preference.
The badges
Four, and each is a specific derived fact rather than a vibe:
| Badge | What it takes |
|---|---|
| First 5★ | Any single 5-star rating |
| 10 projects delivered | Ten delivered bookings |
| Always on time | At least five rated projects averaging 4.5+ on timeliness |
| Repeat-booked | The same brand booking you again |
Repeat-booked is the one to want. It's the hardest to fake and the most informative signal in the entire system: nobody rehires someone who was difficult, whatever the finished work looked like.
Badges don't regress. One granted historically stays granted even if later inputs drift.
What actually raises it
In order of effect:
- Deliver more paid bookings. Volume is what moves a Bayesian mean. There's no shortcut past this and the design is deliberate.
- Be on time. The most controllable of the three dimensions, and it carries its own badge.
- Communicate well: proactively, per managing expectations. Silence is what most low communication scores are actually punishing.
- Concentrate in a speciality until you clear three ratings there.
- Get rebooked. Which is mostly a consequence of 2 and 3.
What doesn't raise it: anything other than delivered, paid, rated work.
Where to see it
Your standing page shows your score, your ratings, your badges and, usefully, your progress towards the badges you haven't earned yet.
Your public profile at /c/your-handle shows the score to brands. Referral cards make an individual rating portable, so you can put a single earned credential on a site you host yourself.
The honest caveat
A score built on few ratings is a weak signal, and it's shown as one rather than dressed up. If you have two ratings, brands are mostly looking at your work and your pitch, as they should be.
The score becomes the differentiator later, once you have a body of delivered work behind it. Early on, it's a promise you're still keeping.
How to use this tomorrow
Open your standing page and look at the three dimensions separately rather than the headline number.
If timeliness is your weakest, that's the most fixable thing in your business, and it's the one with a badge attached.
Related: Setting up a profile that gets picked covers what a brand sees alongside the score. A portfolio that gets you booked is why proof you didn't select yourself matters.