Core Features

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

Creators upload into the Hub. 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.

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.

Royalties and payout models

Every creator has one base model, set per creator or inherited from the workspace default.

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.

Ad research

Discovery, inside the Hub, searches the Meta Ad Library so a brand can look at what else is running before briefing the next batch. It has three views: a keyword and brand search with filters for country, ad status and media type; a feed of the latest ads from brands you follow; and recommendations based on what you have been searching and saving.

Any ad can be saved straight to a board, which puts a competitor's creative next to the brief that answers it. Discovery is brand only.

Working surfaces