Usage rights is a term you have maybe seen in your contracts. Here will go in depth on what they mean, how much you should charge and why it is important. The content you create is owned by YOU so it’s important to know your usage rights as a content creator when you’re negotiating with brands.
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Usage rights are how you can define who owns the content you’ve created and where it can be used. Brands pay a usage rights fee to be able to use your content on ads, promotional email, on their website or social media, among other places. When you work with brands, they’ll include this term in the contract. Make sure to always look out for it, since you could be leaving money on the table if you don’t negotiate a usage rights fee.
This fee can be a monthly, yearly or one-time perpetual fee.
Brands have more recently started to distribute influencer-made content across social media, digital marketing, and in real life.
This is an efficient method for brands to get high-quality content that they own and manage without having to set up the production process itself. It’s also useful for reaching more consumers across a variety of platforms. On top of that, influencer-made content seems more organic and tends to have higher conversions than highly curated ads.
They’ve become a primary aspect of paying creators and influencers. It’s important you’re getting paid for usage rights as it is another revenue stream for you and brands shouldn’t be getting away with advertising your image and likeliness for free.
There aren’t specific guidelines on how much to charge for usage rights. It all comes down to how much you think your content is worth and how long does the brand want to use it for.
However, there are some tips on how much you should charge brands for usage rights. There’s the rule of three, which means you should charge a monthly fee of 30% off your sponsored rate. Let’s say you charged the brand $100 for creating and posting the content, you should be charging $33 monthly for usage rights.
But, if you create very niche content, you might be able to charge more. This also depends on the amount of deliverables and time the brand wants to use your content for.
You could offer a monthly, quarterly, half a year and yearly package. It’s always good to offer a discount on longer packages – everyone loves a good deal. The longer a brand wants to use your content, the higher the discount they get and the higher the fee you get paid.
We advise against giving perpetual rights to brands. Perpetuity means they could own your content for life. And the reason we advise agains it is because it is hard to define how much to charge for such a long amount of time. Aside from that, your image and likeliness would be linked to that company for an indefinite amount of time. And it is hard to back out from this.
Using this information as a starting price guide for usage rights can help you be more prepared in future brand collaborations. It’s important that you are aware of what you deserve when managing your content and how it’s used.
For your future brand collaborations, make sure you are invoicing brands the proper amount for your compensation. We also offer free invoice templates!
