In feed video the hook is the whole game. The viewer has not chosen to watch; the video appeared. The first second has to earn the second one. A hook can be a line (“I was wrong about this”), a visual (the product doing something odd), a text overlay, or a question. The platforms measure it directly: Meta’s 3-second video plays metric counts the number of times a video played for at least 3 seconds (Meta), and advertisers divide that by impressions to get a hook rate.
For commission UGC the hook is where the money is decided before any sale. A video nobody watches past the first second sells nothing, whatever the commission rate.
Example. Two versions of the same skincare video differ only in the first two seconds. Version A opens on the bottle. Version B opens on the creator wiping off makeup with the line “day 14 of trying this”. Shown to the same audience with the same budget, A gets 3-second plays on 18 % of impressions and B on 31 %. B goes on to drive more clicks and more code redemptions, and the creator on a share of sales earns more from B. Example numbers, not a benchmark.
When brands use it. The pain this answers: “We paid $300 a video and nine out of ten never beat our control.” Most of the nine lost in the first second. Brands brief two or three hook options per video and ask the creator to film each one, so the same body can be tested with different openings. Hook-only variations are the cheapest form of creative testing.
The creator’s view. The hook is the one part of the video worth over-delivering on. Creators on a share of sales or ad spend have a direct interest in it, since the brand will put budget behind the opening that holds attention.
On HourlyUGC. Hourly sessions and per-video campaigns are how brands get enough openings to test; commission on ad spend (1 to 30 %, Meta) pays the creator whose opening wins.