Glossary
What Is Whitelisting?
Whitelisting means a brand gets permission to run paid ads through a creator's own social media account rather than their own. The ad shows the creator's handle, profile photo and name, and the brand controls the targeting and the budget behind it. On Meta this is usually called Partnership Ads or Brand Partner Ads; on TikTok the equivalent is Spark Ads. Either way, the mechanism is the same: the brand is borrowing the creator's identity to make an ad convert better than one running from a faceless brand account.
That borrowed credibility is exactly why whitelisting is worth more than an ordinary usage licence, and why it should be priced separately from both the base content fee and plain paid-media usage. A base rate covers one organic post to the creator's own audience. Paid usage lets the brand run the video as an ad from their own account. Whitelisting goes a step further and puts the ad under the creator's name — which means the creator's reputation is attached to whatever the brand's media team decides to spend against it, for however long the flight runs.
The market has settled on a rough ladder: roughly 25 to 50 percent of the base rate for a 30-day flight, climbing toward 70 to 120 percent at 90 days. What to watch for: an open-ended duration, no cap on ad spend, and creative the creator has not approved. All three should be pinned down in writing before a whitelisting request is accepted, because once the ad is live it is running under the creator's own name.
In practice
A skincare brand asks a creator to whitelist her top-performing Reel for 30 days of paid media through her own Instagram handle. Her base rate for the Reel is $2,340, so whitelisting at 30% adds $702 — billed as a separate line, with the flight capped at 30 days in the contract.
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