Usage rights: the clause that costs creators thousands.
“Perpetual, worldwide, all media” turns one post into every advert a brand runs, forever, for the price of the post. Here is what each level is actually worth.
The thing itself
You’re selling two things. Most creators price one.
The short answer
Usage rights are the brand’s permission to use your content somewhere other than your own grid. It is a second thing you’re selling, priced on top of the posting fee rather than included in it.
Add 25 to 50 percent for a month of paid ads, and 150 to 300 percent for perpetual, all media.
If you take one idea off this whole site, take that one.
I ran a talent agency for six years and I read every contract that came back before anybody signed it. A perpetual-usage clause is still the thing I most often tell a creator to walk away from.
Not because it’s rare. Because it’s ordinary, and being ordinary is exactly why it goes through unread.
Where “somewhere other than your grid” ends up
- Paid ads on social
- Their own website
- Their email marketing
- In-store
The wording
Read it slowly. Each word is doing separate damage.
The sentence in question
“Perpetual, worldwide, all media, in all formats now known or hereafter devised.”
It appears in a lot of standard contracts. It means forever, everywhere, including formats that don’t exist yet, for the fee they’re paying you for one post.
None of that is illegal. The person who emailed it to you very often didn’t write it and has never been asked about it.
Asking for a term isn’t an accusation. It’s the other half of a negotiation that has only had one side in it so far.
Word by word
- Perpetual. There’s no end date, so there is never a moment when the licence lapses and somebody has to come back and pay you again.
- Worldwide. No market is carved out, including the ones the brand hasn’t launched in yet.
- All media. Not only paid social. Their website, their email, print, in-store screens.
- In all formats now known or hereafter devised. Whatever the next platform turns out to be, they already have it.
What each level is worth
Quoted on top of your fee, never instead of it.
Work out what the posting is worth first. Then add. These are the percentages I applied from the agency side, on top of the number the creator and I had already agreed.
Organic only
It lives on your grid and nowhere else. This is the default, and it should be written down as the default
Exclusivity, 30 days
You cannot work with a competitor for a month. That is lost income, and it has a price
Paid ads, 1 month
They can run your face as an advert for thirty days
Whitelisting
They run ads from your handle, so your account carries the association
Paid ads, 3 months
A full quarter of paid media using content you made
Exclusivity, 6 months
Half a year of turning down an entire category
Paid ads, 6 to 12 months
This is a media buy. Price it like one
These are what the market supports, based on published bands and my own campaign records. They are not a guarantee of what any brand will pay you.
Perpetual, all media
Forever, everywhere, including print and in-store. Rarely worth it. Push for a term instead
Read the last one against the first
Same post, same shoot, same day of your life. The difference between those two versions of the deal is a multiple, not a rounding error.
The rate calculator applies these on top of your band, and the rates page draws the bars to scale against each other.
From the other side
I buy this clause too, and here is what I tell brands.
I still source creators for brands running campaigns, so I’m on both sides of this in the same week.
A brand that has already decided to run ads and hasn’t mentioned it isn’t being clever. It’s building itself a bill it will have to settle later at a worse price.
A brief that says nothing about usage isn’t a brief with no usage in it. It’s a brief where nobody has decided yet.
Whoever names the first number sets the frame. There’s no reason that person can’t be you.
What I say at brief stage
If you intend to run creator content as paid media, tell me now. Usage negotiated up front costs a fraction of usage bought retrospectively, and retrospective usage is where most creator campaigns quietly overspend.
The most expensive mistake in creator marketing is running content as an advert when you only bought organic rights to it. It happens constantly.
The brands page is the rest of that conversation.
What to do about it
Ask for a term. Then price the term.
Ask before you answer anything else
If the brief doesn’t say what happens to the content after you post it, that’s the question to send back, and it goes before the fee, not after it. You cannot price a job whose scope you haven’t been told.
Swap perpetual for a term
Three, six or twelve months. If the answer comes back perpetual anyway, that’s fine. You now know exactly what you’re being asked for, and there’s a card in the grid above with a number on it.
Put it on its own line in the quote
One line for the content, one line for the licence. Two numbers, not one. That makes it obvious the moment somebody tries to take the licence off the table without taking anything off the price.
The sentence you can send today
That figure is for organic posting only. If you want to run it as a paid ad, that’s priced separately.
The offer check writes the rest of the reply around it and puts a number in it, and it doesn’t ask for your email to do it.
Where it bites hardest
Beauty, and why fast fashion is the opposite problem.
Beauty brands reuse content heavily. That isn’t a criticism, it’s the model: assets go into paid, onto the site, into email, and they stay there. Premium beauty sits in the upper half of the rate band partly because of it.
Usage terms matter more in beauty than in any category I’ve worked in, so raise them early rather than at contract stage.
A beauty fee that looks generous against the band can still be the cheap end of the deal for them, once you count how many places that content ends up. Look at what they’re buying, not only at what they’re paying.
Fast fashion is the mirror image. It sits at or below the bottom of every published band and works with the most creators.
The lever there is rarely the fee. It’s keeping the licence narrow, so a small fee stays a small job. Category moves all of this, and the full order of it is on the rates page.
If you take one thing from this page
This is the single largest sum of money creators hand over without noticing, and the reason is almost always that the contract said “in perpetuity” in a paragraph nobody read.
Ask for a term. Three, six or twelve months. Then price it.
Going further
The clause has seven friends.
Usage is the one that costs the most. It isn’t the only one worth arguing about.
The Brand Partnership Guide is 62 pages on the money and the paperwork: pricing the content and the licence separately, the eight contract clauses that cause almost every argument, and a real negotiation walked through line by line.
If you’d rather start free, the table on this page is the whole thing, and the free guide is what happens once you have sent the email.
The list
What brands are actually paying.
Rate breakdowns, pitch teardowns, and when a brand comes to me looking for creators, that goes out here first. The free guide arrives the moment you sign up.
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