Rates and payment
Performance-based pay
Performance-based pay ties some or all of a creator's compensation to results such as sales, sign-ups, or clicks, rather than to publishing the content.
Also called pay per performance, commission-based deal.
It aligns incentives and caps a brand's downside, which is why brands like it. Creators are warier, because results depend on things they do not control: the landing page, the price, whether the product is in stock, and how the offer converts.
The workable version is a base fee that covers the creator's production cost plus a performance bonus on top. Structures that pay nothing unless a sales threshold is met tend to be declined by anyone with an established rate.
Related terms
- Affiliate marketing
- In an affiliate deal a creator earns a percentage of the sales they generate, tracked through a unique discount code or link, rather than a fixed fee.
- Flat fee
- A flat fee is a fixed amount paid to a creator for agreed deliverables, regardless of how the content performs.
- ROAS
- ROAS is revenue divided by the spend that produced it, expressed as a multiple. A campaign that returned 30,000 in revenue on 10,000 of spend has a ROAS of 3.
- Conversion tracking
- Conversion tracking is how a brand ties a sale back to the creator who drove it, usually through a unique discount code, a tracked link, or a survey at checkout asking how the customer found the brand.
Distinct is the workspace where brands and creators run the work behind these terms. For brands, for creators, or back to the full glossary.