Marketers say usage rights are driving up the price to work with creators

“There’s no consistency in terms of how pricing is presented,” said Danielle Wiley, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Sway. “When we go out to a creator or to a manager and ask for pricing, we are very clear: ‘This is for the post. This includes 30 days paid usage, two months organic usage, and 30 days exclusivity. And we want a price for that’.”

Wiley said pricing structure widely ranges — brands often give pricing separately, or offer usage pricing by the day, and influencers sometimes charge for a post and don’t include any paid usage at all. “There’s no understanding of how to structure this stuff,” she said. 

Roz Sedaghat, director of legal affairs at creator marketing Pearpop, regularly drafts creator agreements. She tells Digiday there’s often a varying understanding of what brands and creators have agreed to in terms of usage.

“Oftentimes the scope of usage rights wasn’t clearly defined at the offer stage,” she said. “I attribute this to the use of shorthand in negotiations…usage rights are presented as organic or paid, and then left at that, and critical details are left out.”

Iluka Enright, senior influencer manager at Movers+Shakers, said it feels like pricing is reverting back to the old school media kits, just with usage instead of platforms as the core focus.

“One TikTok Reel is this, one Facebook post is this, it was all so broken down,” she said. “When I’m outreaching to talent…we are seeing much more of ‘Hey, a video is going to be made, this is what the cost is for the video. Syndication to both platforms is going to cost an additional of whatever this is.’”

She said that usage and exclusivity are additional costs almost 100% of the time, and she doesn’t see that going away. 

The creator marketers and execs Digiday spoke with highlighted just how widespread the discrepancies in creator pricing are — and had varying answers to typical usage length (some said monthly, others weekly).

Aundrea Leckie, director of account management at creator marketing company Open Influence, said she’s finding more brands lately are trying to get usage rights in perpetuity, something she believes isn’t advantageous for them. 

“They don’t actually intend to use that content in four or five years,” she said. “They just don’t want the hassle of the usage rights conversation.”

Meta recently said that 71% of consumers make a purchase within days of seeing creator content on its platforms, and partnership ads get an average of 13% higher click-through rates versus standard brand ads. With that kind of marketing power so obvious and now well-established, brands are getting smarter about usage rights. And, as Tim Sovay chief partnerships officer at CreatorIQ says, they’re ever more insatiable for content. 

“Brands are rewarded by replacing, feeding, and replacing their advertising assets month over month,” he said. “You need a whole new set of creative to come through to help with performance this month versus last month.” That means that costly, lengthy usage rights are even less beneficial for brands. 

Enright said that usage feeds also change based on the client, with typical beauty clients paying creators less than say, a tech brand, because beauty brands roll out new content every season, whereas tech products tend to be more evergreen.

Solving the usage rights problem

Those who spoke with Digiday all agreed that the pricing problem around usage is rarely a nefarious company trying to rip off a creator by buying their rights in perpetuity for pennies. However, there’s a clear problem that requires clarity in conversation and expectation so everyone walks away happy — or at least not outright pissed. 

“Clear usage rights don’t just benefit creators; they’re equally valuable to brands,” Sedaghat said. 

She suggested the granularity of usage rights should be a part of partnership conversations “very early on,” that contract language instead of shorthand should be used in these agreements,” and that brands and agencies should be available to answer questions creators have. 

“Having an agency with their own in-house legal team helps a lot, too,” she said. “These conversations are best catered to those with the experience that something as labyrinth as usage rights requires.”

Leckie stressed transparency and education around what creators charge and how – a flat fee for usage rights per month, or a percentage of paid media spend – and that information shouldn’t just come from agencies like her own. 

“Having more discourse on LinkedIn or summits or conversations that are fruitful and thoughtful,” she suggested, before wondering if that kind of transparency could help bring usage rights back down to “reality.”

Lately, Leckie told Digiday she’s tried out non-concurrent usage, offering up an example of her work with a vacation-focused brand she declined to name. 

“Their business is super season, so we wanted to secure content in February but use it again in December, but to pay for a year of usage was crazy,” she explained. “We secured six months of non-concurrent usage, we’d give them a heads-up of what general timeframes we were using, and creators were completely okay with it and we could leverage cost-effective rates.” 

Enright’s solution has been to pre-negotiate usage rights; telling a creator exactly what they’d pay for extended usage for a certain period of time.

“I think [usage negotiation] is getting better because there is more verbiage around what that usage looks like,” she said. “It’s definitely not easier, but it is less of a friction point because brands and agents are coming together more.”