Your creators are giving you their videos for free. Don’t take them.

A creator just made a video that’s going to do six figures for your brand. Then they message you and offer full usage rights, every platform, forever, for free.

What do you do?

I put that on LinkedIn as a question. This is the longer answer, because I was that creator once, and because I now sit on the other side of the table and see brands make this call every week.

What they're actually offering

First, the terms, because people mix them up.

On TikTok, a creator can give you a Spark code for their video. That lets you run it as an ad from their account. The code lasts up to a year. When you run Spark on an affiliate video, sales still go through their affiliate link, so they keep earning commission on every one. That’s why creators hand Spark codes over without thinking about it. They’re already getting paid.

Off platform is different. The moment you take that video to Meta, YouTube, Amazon, or your own site, there’s no affiliate link. Their commission is zero. That’s what “usage rights” means in practice: the right to use their face and their words to sell your product in places where they earn nothing.

When a creator offers you that for free, forever, they’re not being generous. They don’t know it’s worth anything. Nobody told them.

Why they don't know

Most TikTok Shop creators didn’t come up through agencies. They got a sample, they earned commission, and if a video hit they were happy. Nobody explained licensing to them because nobody in the affiliate model had to. The platform handles the money.

I know this because I was the same. I started making content because I wanted to make money online. I didn’t have a marketing background or a business background. At one point I had hundreds of marketing teams reaching out to me, and every one of them wanted the same thing: a flat rate for a post.

The cookie jar

There’s something else going on with creators that brands don’t see.

When I started in e-commerce over ten years ago, the way people talked about an audience was a cookie jar. Every post either puts a cookie in or takes one out. Entertainment, value, a story, that’s a deposit. Asking for something, a sale, a click, a follow, that’s a withdrawal. The rule on Instagram back then was 80/20. At least 80 percent of your posts had to be pure value with no call to action. 20 percent could be monetized, and 20 was the ceiling, not the target. Go past it and your account stops growing.

Now look at a TikTok Shop affiliate posting a hundred product videos a month. Every single one is a withdrawal. I remember the feeling of not wanting to sell out, of not wanting my word to mean nothing because I’d promoted everything. Those videos live forever. A lot of creators who are professionalizing right now are going to look back and regret how much of their voice they spent on other people’s brands.

That anxiety is real, and it should matter to you, because a creator whose word means nothing is worth nothing to your brand either.

The team that didn't take the deal

Out of all those marketing teams, one didn’t ask for a post.

They offered me an advisory role with equity, and then they explained what that meant, because they could tell I didn’t know. They walked me through the whole thing before I agreed to anything.

They could have gotten me for a flat rate and underpaid me like everyone else was trying to. Instead they figured out the incentive that made sense long term and set it up as a win for both of us.

Here’s what that did. I wanted them to win. I wanted to make great content for them, not because I was paid for a post but because I was rooting for them. When you pay a creator once for one video, you get what you get. You paid me once, I made the video once. When the incentives line up, you get someone who cares whether the thing works.

I still think about that team. They’re a business connection I respect, and if they called tomorrow I’d pick up. That’s the difference between a transaction and a partnership, and it came down to one conversation where somebody chose to explain instead of take.

Why teaching them is the better business move

I’m not asking you to be nice. I’m telling you it’s the better deal.

Take the free rights and short term you win. Then the creator learns what those rights were worth, because creators talk in the same group chats and Discords you recruit from. Now you’re the brand that took advantage of them, and every creator they know hears about it. Your reputation with creators is your creative supply chain. Burn it and the videos stop.

Explain the structure instead, and three things happen.

They become an actual ambassador. Not a creator you paid, a creator who tells other creators you’re the brand that treated them right.

They work with fewer brands. A creator with good terms doesn’t need to promote forty products a month. They promote fewer, and their word carries more weight for each one, including yours. You’re paying for the cookie jar to stay full.

You built an in-house creator you don’t pay a salary. If you invest in a creator, give them fair terms, teach them how the deals work, and help them get better at the content, you end up with someone who makes great videos for your brand on commission. That’s an employee you don’t pay except when it sells.

What we tell brands to do

This is what we set up with the brands we work with.

On TikTok, take the Spark code. They keep earning commission on every sale the ad drives, so that’s already fair.

Off platform, where their commission stops, pay them. A 90 day license on the video that you can renew, or 10 percent of whatever you spend behind it. Pick whichever the creator prefers.

If you want the video forever, forever has a price. It isn’t zero.

Put it in writing before you run anything. A one-page agreement that says which platforms, how long, how much, and when it renews.

Tell them why. “Here's how we run this with all our creators” is the sentence that turns a transaction into a partnership. That one line is the whole point of this post.

The workflow for this is getting easier. Refunnel does usage rights requests in one click. Euka lets you license content, push it straight into Meta Ads, and pay the creator a percentage of ad spend without leaving the platform. Every affiliate CRM is shipping some version of it. The tooling isn’t the hard part anymore. The decision is.

The short version

Creators are going to learn what their content is worth either way. The only question is whether they learn it from you or from the brand that treated them right after you didn’t.

Somebody did it for me. I’m still rooting for them ten years later. That’s what you’re buying when you pay a fair rate for something a creator offered you for free.

If you’re running affiliates and you don’t have a system for collecting usage rights on every video, paying creators fairly for them, and getting the winners into your Meta ads, message me. That’s what we set up.