“We paid $300 a video and nine out of ten never beat our control.”
Paying creators a percentage of ad spend means the creator earns a share of every dollar you put behind their video as a Meta ad. It is one of the two kinds of commission in UGC (the other is a share of sales). No spend, no pay. The one video in ten that beats your control gets scaled, and its creator is paid as it scales; the nine that lose get paused at $50 and cost you $5 each. Spend is a number your ad account already reports per ad, so there is nothing to attribute and nothing to argue about. The creator earns while the ad spends, so the creator makes the ad that spends.
Why flat fees make the nine losers expensive
When a video is bought for a flat fee, the brand pays the full price before knowing which of the ten it is. The media buyer then does the sorting: test, pause nine, scale one. The nine were paid in full for existing. The one is scaled for months with no further cost, and the creator who made it has no stake in how far it goes. Brands that switched state the rule in one line: “pay creators a % of the spend on their video,” so you only pay for winners (Cody Schneider on X, 1 October 2026).
Commission on ad spend reverses both halves. The sorting happens before most of the money is paid, and the creator’s income tracks the media buyer’s decision. That is why the model is spreading: Trybe lists Meta performance pay, “paid on ad metrics like clicks, impressions or ad spend,” among its six pay models (2 September 2026), and Lumanu’s analysis of $500M in creator payouts found that brands typically reimburse creators 1 to 7 % of the spend run through creator accounts.
The fix: a share of spend with a cap, built from the stored video
Three decisions:
- The rate. A percent of Meta spend on ads built from the delivered video. Start under 10 %. Public references run from Lumanu’s 1 to 7 % payout data and its 4 % worked example (5 November 2026), through Trybe’s founder suggesting 5 to 10 % when revenue cannot be shared (8 June 2026), to Top Growth Marketing’s 10 to 20 % “for high-volume creators” (updated 23 October 2026). One brand’s public program sits in between: a Wispr Flow growth lead’s post (8 October 2026) describes creators on 7 % of ad spend for as long as each ad runs, across 500 to 700 UGC ads a month (Hector Serrano on X); their number. Vendor guides sit higher than payout data; believe the payout data.
- The cap. A maximum per video, set at the share of the most you would ever spend on one video. State it in dollars in the brief.
- The path. Every ad with a creator share is built from the stored video through the one path that knows which creator and which term the video carries. A file downloaded and uploaded by hand into Ads Manager is not linked to anything, and no share can be counted on it.
Example. A brand offers 8 % of ad spend, capped at $1,500 per video. Three creators deliver one video each.
| Video | Week 1 spend | Weeks 2 to 4 | Total spend | Creator earns at 8 % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A, paused after testing | $200 | $0 | $200 | $16 |
| B, steady | $500 | $2,500 | $3,000 | $240 |
| C, the winner | $800 | $19,200 | $20,000 | $1,500 (cap reached at $18,750) |
Creator cost: $1,756 on $23,200 of media, 7.6 %. Creator C earned ten times a $150 flat fee and the brand paid $16 for the video that failed. At a flat $300 each, the brand would have paid $900 for the same three videos, $600 of it for A and B.
Spend share or sales share?
Both are commission; they pay for different things.
| Share of ad spend | Share of sales | |
|---|---|---|
| Creator earns on | Your budget behind their video | Orders traced to their video |
| Needs attribution | No, spend is per ad | Yes, links, codes, pixel or the platform’s count |
| Pays when the creator’s own post sells and you never run an ad | No | Yes |
| Pays when you scale an ad that does not convert | Yes, until you pause it | No |
| Works with no checkout (apps, lead gen, retail) | Yes | No |
| Dispute risk | Low | Medium |
Many campaigns carry both: spend share on the ads, sales share on the creator’s links and posts. One order is never paid under both. See mixing UGC pay models.
How HourlyUGC does it
On HourlyUGC, a share of ad spend is a commission setting on the campaign, from 1 to 30 % of Meta spend, with an optional cap per video, with or without an hourly or per-video base. The mechanics:
- No ad account needed to set it. You choose the share when you create the campaign; Meta is connected later, in Build Ads.
- Build Ads reads spend per ad. You pick approved videos from the Library, choose the Meta ad account, set the campaign, ad set and a naming template with creator and video in it, and launch into your own account. Spend on each ad is then read from the network and matched to the source video and creator. The Ads tab shows upcoming charges by video and by creator before they are taken.
- Manual uploads are not linked. A video downloaded and uploaded by hand is not tied to a creator term, so no share is counted on it. Build every ad with a share through Build Ads.
- Terms freeze at upload. Each video keeps the share it was delivered under. Change the campaign and only new videos take the new share; the campaign tells you how many delivered videos keep the old one before you confirm.
- Each tile shows the term. Before launch, the review sums what the selected videos will pay creators.
Pairing with the creator’s handle is optional. Meta partnership ads let the ad run from the creator’s Instagram handle with your brand named as sponsor; Meta requires the creator’s permission, revocable at any time (Meta Business Help Center). On HourlyUGC the brand requests the partnership once per creator and the builder re-reads Meta’s approval for each video at build time. The share of spend pays the creator for the video and the handle together. See Meta partnership ads for UGC.
What to write in the brief
Five facts, before anyone films:
- The rate, as a percent of Meta spend, and the cap per video in dollars.
- Which spend counts: ads built from the delivered video, in your account.
- When it is counted: read from the ad account, daily.
- When it is paid: for example, within 7 days of month end.
- That delivered videos keep their term when the campaign changes.
Write the rate in money too: “8 % of ad spend. A $5,000 run pays you $400.”
Where creators also post the video on their own account, they must disclose the relationship. The FTC says to disclose “if you got anything of value to mention a product,” placed with the endorsement itself (FTC, Disclosures 101).
Proof
The spend-share workflow depends on approved videos moving into ads without a detour through someone’s laptop. Kitsch runs its creator program on HourlyUGC with that review-then-Library-then-Build Ads path; the workflow is in the Kitsch case study. ALLSALE’s Head of Growth: “The rights are ours the moment payment clears. Everything sits in one place, so the team stopped chasing invoices and files.”
Next step
Start a campaign on HourlyUGC with a share of ad spend, approve only the videos you would run, and build the ads from the Library so every dollar of spend is matched to the creator who earned it. Pricing is on https://hourlyugc.com/pricing.