Royalties and payouts
How a video is priced, how an earned balance becomes money in a creator's bank account, and what you can automate.
Royalty terms
Terms live in Settings, under the Royalty Terms tab. The default set is inherited by every new creator, and any creator can be given their own.
| Field | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Payout model | How ad performance is priced. Three options, below | Percent of revenue |
| Rate | The percentage or amount the model reads | 5% |
| Submission fee | Paid once when a video is approved, on top of the model | None |
| Payout cap | The most a single video can ever earn | Uncapped |
| Hold period | Days before an earned balance becomes available | 14 days |
| Minimum payout | The floor a cash out has to clear | 10, in the workspace currency |
| Currency | The currency creators are paid in | USD |
The payout schedule field on a set of terms is a label describing your intent. It does not move money. Scheduled payment is configured separately, under automatic pay runs, because a workspace can hold several sets of terms and only one bank account.
The three payout models
Every creator has exactly one base model.
| 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 rather than sales |
Meta performance is measured one of three ways: per 1,000 impressions, per click, or as a percent of ad spend. It pays on delivery, so a creator earns from a video even when it sells nothing. That is worth deciding on deliberately rather than discovering on a pay run.
What layers on top
Three things sit on top of whichever base model is set.
Submission fee
A fixed amount paid once, the moment a video is approved. It does not wait for the video to run.
Retainer
A guaranteed floor per period, conditional on a volume goal.
Bonus
A discretionary amount, paid straight away and outside the payout cap.
A retainer is a floor rather than a fee. Set a floor amount, a period and a goal in approved videos. At the end of the period, if the creator met the goal, Hotline tops up the difference between their royalties and the floor. A creator who earned more than the floor gets no top up, because the floor was already cleared. Retainers are evaluated monthly, on the first of the month.
Three places terms can come from
Terms resolve in order, most specific first:
| Level | Set in |
|---|---|
| This video | The Terms panel on the creative's card |
| This creator | Their row in People |
| The workspace | Settings, then Royalty Terms |
A single video can be given its own rate without touching the creator's deal, which is how "double royalties on the new flavour" works without editing every creator one at a time.
Freezing, and then locking
Terms are frozen onto a video when it is approved. Editing a creator's terms afterwards prices their new work and never touches work already approved. Two videos by the same creator can carry different terms, and each one reports against its own.
Once a video goes live as an ad in Meta, those terms are locked for good. Nothing moves them afterwards: not a change to the creator's deal, not un-approving and re-approving, not the Terms panel, which becomes read-only and says why. Re-approving a live video pays no second submission fee.
The lock is a money rule, not only a promise. The nightly accrual prices every ad day that has no figure yet, however old, and under a revenue share a day with no sales stays open in case a sale is attributed to it later. Switching a live video to a delivery model would pay that whole backlog at once.
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 out.
From earning to bank account
Royalties accrue once a day, against the terms frozen on each video, stopping at that video's cap. An earning sits pending until the hold period has passed, then becomes available. Only available earnings can go into a pay run.
Pay runs
A pay run is the brand paying. It charges you the creators' royalties plus Stripe's processing cost for the rail, and moves the money into each creator's Hotline balance.
The rail is decided by your payout currency: BECS Direct Debit for Australian dollars, card for everything else. BECS costs materially less and is capped, but it is a delayed method, so the debit clears about two business days after you authorise it rather than immediately.
Hotline collects from the brand before it pays creators, so it never fronts the money. A creator's balance is credited when your payment succeeds, and settles to available two days later.
Running one by hand
Open Payouts
Creators whose balance has cleared its hold period are listed with what they are owed.
Pick who to pay
Tick the creators you want in this run. A single run cannot mix currencies.
Pay
Hotline prices the run, locks those earnings so a second run cannot claim them, and hands you a Stripe checkout page.
Automatic pay runs
A schedule charges a saved payment method without anyone opening Stripe.
Save a payment method
From Payouts or Settings, authorise a payment method to be charged when you are not present. For AUD that is a BECS Direct Debit mandate.
Choose a cadence
Every week, every two weeks, or every month, with the day you want. Runs are anchored to 9am Melbourne time, which keeps every debit inside the BECS same day cutoff.
Set a per creator minimum
A creator below it sits out the run and their earnings stay available for the next one, so you are never charged a processing fee to move money into a balance the creator cannot withdraw yet. Leave it blank to inherit the minimum payout on your terms.
A weekend date is honoured rather than quietly moved. BECS processes it on the next business day either way, and shifting the date would make the next run date you are shown untrue.
Hotline emails you when a scheduled debit is submitted, since nobody clicked it, and again if it fails.
What a failure does to the schedule depends on the kind. A declined debit that could succeed later, most often insufficient funds, earns exactly one retry three business days out, and the earnings return to available in the meantime. Should that second attempt fail too, the schedule pauses, because debiting an account that has already bounced twice costs you another dishonour fee and gets creators paid no sooner. Two kinds of failure skip the retry entirely and pause on the spot: a bank that cancelled the authorisation, and a run larger than your direct debit limit. Neither can succeed on a second try.
Manual runs ignore the per creator minimum, because there you are choosing explicitly.
Cash outs
A pay run puts money into a creator's Hotline balance. A cash out moves it from there into their own bank account, through the Stripe Connect account they onboarded themselves.
Creators can cash out whenever their available balance clears the minimum payout. They can also turn on automatic cash outs and set their own threshold, which is swept once a day.
A creator has to finish Stripe onboarding before any balance can leave Hotline. Until they do, earnings still accrue and still settle, they simply cannot be withdrawn.