What is paid social? Meaning for UGC creators

Paid social: Paid social is advertising on social media platforms, where a brand pays to show posts or ads to a chosen audience instead of relying on organic reach.

Paid social is advertising on social media. A brand pays TikTok, Meta, YouTube or another platform to show a post or ad to an audience it picks. It’s the opposite of organic content, which reaches people without ad spend. For UGC creators, it matters because paid use of your video is priced differently from an organic post.

How it works

The brand sets a budget, an audience and a goal such as installs or sales, and the platform charges for delivery. A common price measure is CPM, the average cost per 1,000 impressions (Meta). That’s what the advertiser pays the platform. It’s not the same as the CPM a brand pays you per 1,000 views on a UGC CPM deal.

UGC shows up in paid social in a few ways:

• Ads from the brand’s account. The brand runs your video as a standard ad, often as a dark post that never shows on its profile.
• Spark Ads. On TikTok, a brand can run organic posts as ads, including creators’ posts with their authorization. Views, likes and follows from the ad count on the original post (TikTok). See Spark Ads.
• Partnership ads. On Instagram and Facebook, a brand can run ads with a creator’s handle once the creator gives permission, and the creator can revoke it at any time (Meta).

Running ads through a creator’s handle is often called whitelisting.

Example

A brand buys four of your videos. It runs all four as ads to the same audience for a week, keeps the one with the lowest cost per install, and moves the budget behind it. The winner then runs for two months. One video you made in an afternoon may reach more people than all your organic posts that month.

Why it matters for UGC creators

• Paid use is worth more. A video running as an ad for months does more work for the brand than one organic post. Price it in your usage rights.
• Hooks get tested hard. Advertisers compare versions by cost per result, so extra hooks per video are worth more to them. See UGC ads.
• Your handle has its own value. If a brand wants to run ads through your account, that’s a separate fee with an end date.
• Ads can run where you can’t see them. Get the platforms and the end date in writing.

Related terms

• Organic content: Organic content is social media posts that reach viewers without paid promotion, through followers, recommendation feeds, search and shares.
• UGC ads: UGC ads are paid social ads made from user-generated-style videos, where a creator shows or talks about a product in a natural, phone-shot style instead of a studio production.
• Whitelisting: Whitelisting (or allowlisting) is when a creator gives a brand permission to run paid ads through the creator's own account, so the ad shows the creator's name and handle.
• Spark Ads: Spark Ads are a TikTok ad format that runs an existing organic post as a paid ad, keeping the original account's name and engagement. Creators grant access with a video code.