A Cookie Creator Relies on Classes, Not Platform Payouts
Cookie creator Maddie Gartman says social media checks swing from a nice chunk to $20, so she fills in-person seats first.
Marketplace · Oil companies pump it upMaddie Gartman, a former teacher turned full-time cookie creator near St. Paul, Minnesota, makes most of her living the old-fashioned way, in a room with students.
Posting as Garty Goodies, she films decorating videos in a small home studio and also trains other cookie decorators. Her method is blunt: treat social media money as a bonus, not a paycheck.
The majority of her income comes from in-person cookie decorating classes, which get especially busy approaching the holidays. She compares that rhythm to the Minnesota State Fair, with much of the money arriving in one chunk of the year.
A smaller share comes from sponsored videos, in which brands pay her to make cookies that advertise their business. The smallest share comes from the platforms themselves, and it swings wildly.
In some months, strong views bring what she calls a nice chunk of change. In other months, the check is $20, and it is hard to know how much she will get.
TikTok offers little pattern to plan around, she said. A video can fail to qualify because viewers did not watch long enough, or because an automated system judged it was not high quality enough.
That is why she says creators should not count on TikTok as their main employer. Her focus stays on filling the in-person classes, because that is the money she knows she can rely on.
She keeps the videos going too, because they help advertise the classes and the rest of her business. She calls the content "a fun added part" that supports the work that pays.
Questions people ask
Why are platform payouts so unpredictable?
Platforms generally share a pool of advertising money based on qualified views, watch time, and advertiser demand, so rates shift by month and season. Programs also filter out videos for short retention, unoriginal content, or automated quality judgments, which can disqualify clips without a clear explanation.
How do sponsored videos fit into this kind of business?
Companies often discover a creator through an existing video and then pay for a custom one. Gartman, for example, was contacted after posting realistic bug-shaped Valentine's cookies she had made for fun. Such deals usually pay a flat fee and are negotiated separately from platform payouts.
Is teaching in person really more stable than posting online?
They can be, because the creator sets the price, the date, and the number of seats, and gets paid whether a clip goes viral or not. They require local demand, space, supplies, and marketing, and income may cluster around holidays and weekends. The trade-off is more scheduling and travel than posting from home.