Guide
UGC & Content
Brands
There are two ways to acquire creator content. The usual one is to decide in advance, commission the content, pay for production, and then find out in your ad account whether it works. The other is to run a performance-based collaboration first, watch which creators and which content actually drive sales, and only then buy usage rights to the material that has already shown it converts. The first buys a forecast. The second buys evidence — at the cost of taking longer and requiring creators willing to start on commission.
Almost every brand buying creator content does it in the same order: decide you need UGC, brief creators, pay for production, receive the files, and then put ad spend behind them to discover whether any of it works. Everything in that sequence happens before you have a single data point about the content.
There is a second order of operations, and it inverts the risk. This article sets out both, when each is right, and what you have to agree in advance for the second to be possible at all.
UGC bought upfront. The brand decides it wants content, pays a creator to produce it, and then tests it. The brand carries the production risk.
UGC bought on the back of performance. The brand starts a performance-based collaboration, lets creators post to their own audiences, measures which creators and which content produce sales, and then buys usage rights to the material that already worked. The risk is shared, and the buying decision is made with evidence.
The classic UGC purchase is a production contract. You write a brief, agree a price per video, the creator films and delivers, and you own defined usage rights for a defined period. Follower count is largely irrelevant — you are hiring a producer, not an audience. The mechanics are covered in how to buy UGC from brief to delivery and priced in how much UGC costs.
This model has real virtues. It is fast, it is predictable, you control the creative direction tightly, and you can specify exactly the formats and aspect ratios your ad account needs. For a product launch with a fixed date, it is often the only option that fits the calendar.
Its weakness is singular and structural: you are paying for content on the basis of a prediction. You are predicting that this creator's style will resonate, that this hook will stop the scroll, that this framing will convert. Some predictions are good. Most brands discover, once the assets are in the ad account, that a minority of what they bought carries the account and the rest is dead weight. That is not a failure of the creators; it is the expected outcome of buying before measuring.
The alternative starts a step earlier and with a different instrument. Instead of commissioning content, you open a performance-based collaboration — creators post to their own followers, each with their own tracking link or discount code, and are paid on tracked results. See performance-based influencer marketing explained for how that arrangement works.
While that runs, it produces something the upfront model never produces: a performance record attached to specific people and specific pieces of content. You learn who actually sold, which hooks preceded the sales, which product framing worked, and which audiences converted rather than merely engaged.
Only then do you spend on content rights. You go back to the creators whose posts demonstrably produced sales and buy the right to use that material — as ad creative, as Partnership Ads, on your product pages, in email. The content you are buying is not a bet. It has already run in front of a real audience and produced a measurable result.
The sequence, stated plainly:
| UGC bought upfront | UGC bought after performance | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | A production forecast | Evidence of what converted |
| Who carries the risk first | The brand | Shared — the creator starts on results |
| Speed | Fast; days to weeks | Slower; the collaboration has to run first |
| Creative control | High — you brief it | Lower — you get the creator's own voice |
| Revenue during the test phase | None | The collaboration itself generates sales |
| Selection signal | Portfolio and taste | Tracked sales |
| Main constraint | You pay for what does not work | Creators must accept a performance component |
All figures in this example are hypothetical and used purely to illustrate the structure. They are not Make Influence customer data, not benchmarks, and not a promise of any result.
Take a webshop with an average order value of DKK 600 that wants a set of ad creatives.
Path A — buy upfront. Commission ten UGC videos at DKK 2,500 each: DKK 25,000. Then spend DKK 20,000 testing them in the ad account. Total outlay DKK 45,000, and the content generated no revenue of its own before the ad spend started.
Path B — buy on the back of performance. Run a commission-based collaboration with ten creators first. Suppose it produces 150 tracked sales at DKK 600, so DKK 90,000 of tracked revenue. At 12% commission the creators earn DKK 10,800, and a platform service fee of 20% of that commission adds DKK 2,160 — DKK 12,960 of variable cost, all of it incurred alongside revenue. Then buy usage rights to the three creators' posts that actually sold, at DKK 3,000 each: DKK 9,000. Then spend the same DKK 20,000 behind content you already know converts.
| Line | Path A (DKK) | Path B (DKK) |
|---|---|---|
| Content production / rights | 25,000 | 9,000 |
| Creator commission and platform fee | 0 | 12,960 |
| Ad spend | 20,000 | 20,000 |
| Total outlay | 45,000 | 41,960 |
| Tracked revenue generated before the ad spend | 0 | 90,000 |
The DKK 3,040 difference in outlay is not the point — that gap could close or reverse with different assumptions. The point is the last row. In Path A the test phase is a pure cost. In Path B the test phase is a campaign that sold things. You are financing your own content selection.
The honest counterweight: Path B took longer, and it only exists if creators will start on a performance basis. That is a real constraint, not a footnote — see upfront vs commission.
The back-end model has one hard prerequisite that brands routinely discover too late: the right to reuse the content is not automatic. A creator posting to their own feed under a performance agreement has not granted you the right to run that video as an ad.
There are two workable approaches, and you should choose deliberately.
Option the rights up front. Agree at the outset what it will cost to license a post later if you want to — a pre-agreed price, or a formula. This costs nothing if you never exercise it and removes the awkward retrospective negotiation.
Negotiate afterwards. Perfectly legitimate, but understand your position: the creator now knows their content sold, and they are entitled to price accordingly. That is fair, and you should budget for it rather than treat it as opportunism.
What you cannot do is assume. Running a creator's organic post as paid media without a licence is a rights problem, not a grey area. See UGC usage rights explained, how long to buy usage rights for, and whitelisting, Spark Ads and Partnership Ads explained for the formats that let you run content from the creator's own handle.
The back-end model is not universally better. Choose upfront production when:
Most mature programmes end up running both: upfront production for the things that must exist on a date, and the back-end model as the always-on engine that keeps finding creators and content worth scaling. That combination is the subject of how to combine UGC, reach and performance and the always-on influencer and UGC system.
The model only works if you select on the right signal. Engagement is the wrong one — that is precisely the trap described in why influencer campaigns get engagement but no sales.
| Signal | What it tells you | Weight it |
|---|---|---|
| Tracked sales per creator | Whether this person can actually sell to their audience | Heavily |
| Conversion rate per click | Whether the content pre-qualified the buyer | Heavily |
| Which hook opened the winning posts | What to brief and what to scale | Heavily |
| Repeat performance across posts | Whether the first result was signal or luck | Decisively |
| Views and likes | Distribution, not persuasion | Lightly |
The row that most changes decisions is repeat performance. One strong post can be a fluke of timing or algorithm. Two or three is a creator worth building around.
Treating the performance phase as a free content mill. Creators notice when a brand's real intent is to harvest content while paying only on commission. State your intent openly and price the rights fairly.
Buying rights to the best-looking content rather than the best-performing content. The whole point is to stop selecting on taste. The video that sold is frequently not the one the marketing team likes most.
Scaling too early. One good week is not a proven creative. Check that the result repeats before putting real spend behind it.
Forgetting that paid distribution changes the audience. Content that converted for a creator's own followers is facing a colder audience once it runs as an ad. It usually still works; it rarely works as well. Plan for the drop.
Ignoring creative fatigue afterwards. Proven creative decays like any other. The back-end model's real advantage is that it keeps producing new candidates — use it that way rather than riding one winner into the ground. See how many UGC creatives to test each month.
This section is Make Influence's own operational view, not an industry standard or a neutral assessment.
This sequence is the model we have built the platform around, and we think it is the more defensible way to spend a content budget in most cases — though not all, for the reasons set out above.
The reason is simple. A brand's hardest problem in this channel is not producing content; production has never been cheaper. The hard problem is selection — knowing which creators and which content deserve more money. Buying upfront forces you to solve that problem by judgement. Running a performance collaboration first lets you solve it with data you generated while selling things.
Two practical notes on how that works on our platform. Creators are manually approved rather than indexed from public profiles, which matters here because the model depends on creators who will actually engage with a performance arrangement. And our service fee is charged as a percentage of the commission paid to the creator — published as 30% on Entry, 25% on Basic, 20% on Growth and 15% on Full Service Pro — so the test phase costs you in proportion to what it earns.
We would also say plainly what this model is not. It is not a way to get content for free, and any brand approaching it that way will get poor creators and poor content. It is a way to pay for content after you know which content is worth paying for — and to pay the creators who earned it more, not less.
Is this just affiliate marketing with extra steps?
No. Affiliate marketing ends at the tracked sale. This model treats the tracked sale as a selection mechanism for a second decision — which content and which creators to license and amplify.
How long does the performance phase need to run?
Long enough to see whether a result repeats, which in practice means more than one post per creator. A single post produces an anecdote.
What if no creator generates meaningful sales?
That is itself a valuable and cheap finding — far cheaper than discovering it after buying ten videos. It usually points at the offer, the landing page or the price rather than at the creators.
Do I still need a brief?
Yes, but a lighter one. You are asking for the creator's own framing, not your script. See how to brief a creator for performance.
Can I do this without a platform?
Yes, with your own tracking links, a spreadsheet and manual reconciliation. It works at small scale and becomes the bottleneck as creator numbers grow — see how to track influencer marketing performance.
How do I price the rights afterwards?
Start from what comparable production would have cost, then account for the fact that this content is proven and the creator knows it. Pre-agreeing a formula at the outset avoids the whole negotiation — see the worked example on upfront, rights and commission.
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