What do you do when a creator has no contact details?

You opened the profile to write to them, and there is nowhere to write. No address under the name. No link. No line saying where to send things. The account, the videos, and that's the page.

For the planter: you make a self-watering planter for people who forget to water, and you have a list of names built from accounts that post plant rescues. The one open in front of you brings ferns back — brown three weeks ago, and you wouldn't know it now. It's the reason the name is on the list. Under the name there is nothing.

What is the empty page telling you?

We've read this page before. Our guide to choosing between a DM and an email opens on the line under the name and sorts what it finds into three answers: "whether they've put a way to reach them on it. There are three answers." An address typed in. No address but a link. Or "Nothing under the name but the account."

That guide does not treat the third one as a search that hasn't finished. It closes it, and closes the reading with it: "That third one is a fact about the page, and for that profile it's the answer." There is no second pass that would help, because "more reading won't change that."

So what you have is a finding about this page that the videos didn't give you.

What that guide hands on is the next move, and it hands it on in a line: "There's nothing left to rank, and what you do next is your call." This is that call.

For the planter: you read the fern account's page twice. The second pass returned what the first one did.

So what is actually left?

You can put together an address they never typed on this page, and the same guide names that: "You can end up with an address they never posted on this profile, including one they posted somewhere else." It doesn't rule that out. It ranks it — "Nothing here rules it out; it goes after the ones that were".

Look at the question that ranking answers. That guide sorts by whether this page named the route, because its job was to choose among the routes the page offered. Under that question, an address they published on a different account and an address something produced belong in the same pile, since neither one is on this page.

That is the right sort for its question and the wrong sort for yours, because your page named nothing and there is nothing on it left to rank. Yours is a different question: did they publish the route you would be using?

For an address, that question has two answers, and every address you could send to falls under one of them.

• A route they published, somewhere that isn't this page.
• A route they didn't publish, which you put together instead.

What separates those isn't how much work each one takes. It's whether you know the place you're writing to is theirs.

One send isn't an address at all. A DM goes to the account you're looking at, so there is nothing to find and no doubt about whose place it is. What it lacks is the page's word: "The page names it only when the line under the name says to write there", and this page says nothing. The page also doesn't tell you whether a message sent there is read. It's a send to a place that is theirs and that they didn't point you to.

There's one more thing you can do, and none of this sorts it, because it isn't a send: you can ask them in public, under one of their videos. It gets its own section below, and its own cost.

For the planter: two names on the list are in this state. The fern account, and one that posts propagation in jam jars.

A route they published somewhere else

They typed an address into a bio. Just not this one.

This is still a route they published. The only thing it lacks is this page's word for it, which is exactly why the DM guide puts it behind the routes that were named. Nothing else about it has changed: you are writing to a place they chose to publish.

What that gets you is a send to a place you know is theirs. If nothing comes back, our guide to what to do when a creator doesn't reply has the list of what could be behind it, and the list is three long. You won't be able to tell which one you're looking at — "the silence is identical in all three" — and that much is true of any send.

For the planter: the jam-jar account uses the same handle somewhere else, and there is an address typed into that bio. That is a route they published. It goes out today.

A route they didn't publish

They posted it nowhere. You have it because something produced it from a name — a pattern, a search, a list built by someone who never met them. It may be theirs. What you cannot do is find that out from the page in front of you.

Send it if you want to. The DM guide doesn't rule it out — "Nothing here rules it out; it goes after the ones that were" — and the no-reply guide has already put a price on adding a route: it "changes whether the message lands at all, which is a different thing and the only thing it does", and "it should cost you a minute and no more." That price was set at a later moment than yours. There, a first message had already gone out and come back empty, and the route was the one thing you could change about the cause that never became a decision. You are earlier, and nothing has gone out. The guide priced the route, and the route still costs what it costs.

What the minute doesn't buy is the thing the other route came with. You don't know the place is theirs, so you won't know afterwards whether the place you wrote to was ever one of theirs.

That doesn't make the silence heavier. The DM guide has weighed a quiet week both ways and found the same weight: "So the silence weighs the same whichever route you used. What differs is what it's a silence from." Read what it says the difference leaves you: "A week of nothing from an address you assembled is a week from a place this account never published — and where the page named something, that answer is still unspent." That last clause is written for a page that named something, and it is the half none of your routes gets. Your page named nothing, so no route the page named is sitting in reserve behind this name.

The dates don't move for any of this. The no-reply guide builds the day you stop waiting by subtraction — "If this name never answers, somebody else has to be asked and has to answer inside the same window, and that ask needs room of its own", so "Take that room off the first date. What's left is the day you stop waiting." — and it says where both of them come from: "Both dates come from this campaign's own calendar". Yours came from there too, and the address you used doesn't move them. The day arrives on schedule, and "The slot goes back to the list."

The day tells you nothing about this name, and it never would have.

For the planter: the fern account has no handle anywhere else, and what you have is an address something put together out of the name. The route costs a minute, and the day you stop waiting stays where the campaign's calendar put it.

Asking where anyone can read it

You can put the question under one of their videos.

No send has an audience. Each one goes to a single place, and nobody but whoever reads that place sees it. A question under their video is read by the people who watch them and by anyone else who opens it.

That's the cost, and what you're spending it on is the thing the page didn't name. None of the sends charges it.

For the planter: you could ask under the fern account's newest rescue, where everyone who came for the fern reads it.

What happens to the name?

Very little, and that's the point.

Your list is what it was before you opened the page. Our guide to choosing creators is exact about what that list is: "A shortlist isn't a ranking. It's what's left after you rule people out." Go back through what you ruled people out on. A line under the name wasn't one of those tests — they were about the work and who watches it.

So this name isn't ruled out. It also isn't asked — and that is a line in your list rather than a claim about them: nothing has gone to a place you know is theirs. Those are two different states, and the list does more for you when it says which one a name is in. A route they published is such a place, and so is the account itself. An address you put together isn't one you can vouch for, so a name you've only written to there is one you haven't asked yet. What moves it is a send to a place that is theirs, not another pass over the same page.

For the planter: the jam-jar account is asked. The fern account gets a DM, and then it is asked too, at a place the page didn't name. The address something put together stays unsent.

Frequently asked questions

Nobody on our shortlist has a way to reach them on the page.

Then what you have is a question about the list, not about a name. Nothing the list was built on asked for a line under the name, so it can come out this way. Each name still gets the sort this guide gives one name. Whether a way to reach them belongs among the tests sits one stage earlier, with the way the list got built.

We asked under a video and they answered with somewhere to write.

Then you have a route they published, and it behaves like one from there on. What you paid to get it stays where you left it.

How do we know whether their DMs are open to us?

The page doesn't say. What it can tell you is whether they asked for one: "The page names it only when the line under the name says to write there." On a page that names nothing, a DM is a send to their account that nobody invited, and silence afterwards won't tell you whether it was seen.

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