Core Features
What Hotline UGC does, surface by surface, from content review through to creator payouts.
Overview
Hotline covers the whole life of a creator video: it arrives, gets reviewed, becomes an ad, earns money, and pays somebody. Each stage has a place in the product.
Content review
Versioned submissions with notes pinned to the frame.
Meta publishing
Approved videos into your own ad account as paused drafts.
Attribution
Spend and revenue against the individual video and creator.
Royalties
Several payout models, per creator or per video.
Payouts
Pay runs through Stripe Connect, into accounts creators own.
Gifting
Send free product from your Shopify catalogue and track the parcel.
Creative Intelligence
What your best performing creative has in common.
Briefs
A brief is the unit of work: what to make, which angles to try, which hooks to avoid, how many videos and by when. Submissions attach to the brief they answer, which is what makes progress against an ask countable rather than a matter of scrolling.
Briefs
Status, visibility, targets and deadlines.
Content review
Creators upload into Content. Every upload is a version, including the first.
Notes are pinned to a timestamp on the video, so feedback points at the frame it is about rather than describing it. When a creator answers a revision request, the new cut arrives as the next version. The previous file stays reachable, and unresolved notes are carried onto the new version with a pointer back to the frame they were drawn on.
The drawing stays with the frame it was drawn on. Copying an annotation onto a different cut with its coordinates intact would leave the arrow pointing at something that moved, so only the note travels.
Publishing to Meta
An approved video goes to Meta with Upload to Meta. You choose the ad account and ad name, and where the ad should sit: duplicate an existing adset, drop it into an existing one, or build one from a saved template.
Ads are created paused. Nothing spends until somebody turns it on in Meta.
Bulk upload takes several approved creatives in one pass, which is the normal way to ship a batch of variants.
Performance and attribution
Meta sends spend, impressions, clicks, reach, video plays, purchases and purchase value back against each individual ad, every two hours. Because each ad is mapped to the video and the creator behind it, the numbers attach to a person rather than to a campaign.
A creative running as several ads can be read either way:
- Individual, one card per ad
- Aggregated, one card per video with a variant count and combined figures
Where Meta provides incremental attribution, iROAS uses it. Where it does not, the card shows an estimate and says so rather than presenting a modelled figure as measured.
A separate daily sync breaks the same performance down by country. It appears per creator on People, showing where their ads reached people and what happened there: impressions, clicks, spend, conversions and ROAS by market.
Creators see impressions, clicks, CTR, spend and earnings for their own videos, and nothing about anyone else's. Account wide figures, other creators' deals and the brand's own numbers are not shown to them.
Royalties and payout models
Every creator has one base model, set per creator or inherited from the workspace default.
| Model | How it prices a day |
|---|---|
| Percent of revenue | A share of the revenue that creator's ad brought in |
| Flat fee per order | A fixed amount for every order the ad drove |
| Meta performance | A rate against delivery, measured per 1,000 impressions, per click, or as a percent of ad spend |
Meta performance pays on delivery rather than sales, so a creator earns from a video even when it sells nothing.
Three things layer on top of whichever base is set:
- Submission fee, paid once when a video is approved
- Retainer, a guaranteed floor per period when a creator hits a volume goal, topping up the difference if royalties fall short
- Bonus, paid straight away and outside the payout cap
Caps and freezing
A payout cap is the most a single video can ever earn. It is shared across every ad running that video, so duplicating a creative into four adsets does not multiply what it can pay.
Terms are frozen onto a video when it is approved. Editing a creator's terms later reprices new work and never touches work already approved, so nobody's agreed rate changes retroactively.
Payouts
Earnings accrue nightly. A balance becomes available after the hold period, and then appears in Payouts.
A pay run charges the brand the creators' royalties plus payment processing at cost, and pays each creator through Stripe Connect into an account the creator owns and onboarded to themselves. Hotline collects from the brand first and pays creators only once that settles, so it never fronts the money and never keeps any of it.
Pay runs can be run by hand or put on a schedule. A scheduled run charges a payment method the brand has authorised in advance, so creators are paid weekly, fortnightly or monthly with nobody clicking through Stripe.
Creators can also cash out themselves once they clear the minimum, and can turn on automatic cash outs at a threshold they choose.
Royalties and payouts
Terms in full, retainers and bonuses, both kinds of pay run, and cashing out.
Gifting
With Shopify connected, creators request products from your real catalogue, or you send one directly without waiting to be asked.
An approved request creates a draft order at a 100% discount in your store and completes it. Nothing is charged and no payment method is used. When you fulfil the order, tracking flows back and the shipment is tracked through to delivery inside Hotline.
Limits on what a creator can ask for, preset bundles, and automatic approval under a value are all configurable.
Gifting
Requests, bundles, limits and tracking in detail.
Creative Intelligence
Hotline classifies every creative on four dimensions, hook, angle, format and voice, then compares those attributes against what the ads actually did. The output is what your winners have in common, with the number of creatives and the spend behind each claim shown beside it.
On Growth and Agency. See Creative Intelligence.
Your own tools
A workspace on Growth or Agency can read its own data directly, through a read-only REST API or an MCP server that connects an AI assistant to the same services.