Creator glossary
The words that turn up in a brand conversation, and what they actually mean. Written for creators working in India.
Money and deals
- Rate card
- A published list of what a creator charges per deliverable, with the terms attached. It does the qualifying before a brand writes to you, so the conversation starts after the price has been accepted rather than before.
- Usage rights
- What a brand is allowed to do with your video beyond you posting it on your own account. Running it as a paid advertisement is a separate product from an organic post and is normally charged at 30% to 100% on top of the base fee.
- Whitelisting
- Giving a brand permission to run paid ads from your own handle, so the ad appears to come from you rather than from them. It performs better than a brand-handle ad, which is why it costs more than standard usage rights.
- Exclusivity
- A clause stopping you working with a brand's competitors for an agreed period. You are selling your next few months of income in that category, so it carries a fee, usually 20% to 50% on top.
- Barter
- Being paid in product instead of money. In India the fair market value of that product is taxable income under Section 194R, so barter is a price and not a favour.
- Retainer
- A fixed monthly fee for an agreed amount of work, instead of pricing each post separately. It trades a higher per-post rate for predictable income.
- Deliverable
- One specific thing you are being paid to make: a reel, a story set, a YouTube integration. Pricing by deliverable rather than by campaign is what stops scope growing after the fee is agreed.
- Advance
- The share of the fee paid before you start. Fifty per cent is common in India; it is the only real protection against a brand that disappears after delivery.
- UGC
- User-generated content: video or photos you shoot for a brand to use on their own channels, without posting it yourself. You are selling production, not audience, so it is priced differently from a post.
Reach and numbers
- Engagement rate
- Interactions divided by either followers or reach, as a percentage. There are at least four common ways to calculate it and they disagree by a factor of three, so always say which one you used.
- Reach
- The number of unique accounts that saw a post at least once. Different from impressions, which counts every view including repeats by the same person.
- Impressions
- The total number of times a post was displayed, counting the same person more than once. Always higher than reach, and the less useful of the two for pricing.
- CPM
- Cost per thousand impressions. A brand divides your fee by your expected views and multiplies by a thousand to compare you against buying ads, which is why your view count matters more to them than your follower count.
- Media kit
- The document or page a brand reads to decide whether to hire you. Four things earn their place: recent work with real numbers, reach per platform, who the audience is, and your rates.
- Audience demographics
- The split of your followers by age, gender and location. For a brand buying a specific group of people this decides the budget more than the follower count does.
- Nano influencer
- A creator with roughly 1,000 to 10,000 followers. Typically the highest engagement rate of any tier, and increasingly bought in bulk by brands for exactly that reason.
- Micro influencer
- A creator with roughly 10,000 to 100,000 followers. The band where most Indian creators start charging properly for brand work.
Tax and law in India
- Section 194R
- The provision of the Income Tax Act that makes a benefit received from a business taxable income for the person receiving it. For creators it means a free product sent in exchange for coverage is income, and the brand must deduct 10% TDS on its value.
- TDS
- Tax Deducted at Source: tax the payer withholds and deposits against your PAN before paying you. Brand fees to creators are commonly deducted at 10% under Section 194J.
- Section 194J
- The provision covering professional and technical fees, under which most brand payments to creators are deducted at 10% TDS.
- GST
- Goods and Services Tax, charged at 18% on creator services. Registration becomes compulsory once turnover from services crosses Rs 20 lakh in a financial year, and rates should be quoted exclusive of it.
- Form 26AS
- The statement showing all tax deducted against your PAN. Check brand payments against it before filing, because a deduction a brand never deposited is one you cannot claim.
- ASCI
- The Advertising Standards Council of India. Its influencer guidelines require a clear, upfront disclosure label on any post where you received money or anything of value, and the label has to be visible without tapping more.
- Disclosure
- The label marking a post as paid or gifted. Under ASCI guidelines it must appear in the first two lines or as a visible overlay, and words like collab or ambassador are not accepted as substitutes.
Pages and links
- Link in bio
- The single clickable link most social platforms allow on a profile, and the page it points at. It exists because the platforms will not let you link anywhere else from a post.
- Affiliate link
- A tracked link that pays you a commission when someone buys through it. The commission is set by the merchant's programme, and any tool that rewrites your link is taking a share of it.
- UTM parameters
- Tags added to the end of a URL so the destination's analytics can tell where a visitor came from. They are how a brand proves your link drove the sale.
- Custom domain
- Using a web address you own for your creator page, instead of a path on somebody else's domain. It means the audience you build is reachable even if the tool disappears.
- Canonical URL
- The address a page declares as its real one when the same content is reachable at more than one. Without it, search engines split the signals between the versions and rank all of them lower.
- Open Graph
- The tags that decide what appears when a link is shared: the title, the description and the preview image. An image under 1200 by 630 pixels is usually shown as a thumbnail or dropped.
- Deep link
- A link that opens a destination inside its own app rather than in a browser. It matters most inside an in-app browser, where a normal link is trapped in the webview it was opened from.
- Shoppable reel
- A video with the products in it tagged, so a viewer can go straight from watching to buying. It answers the comment every creator gets, which is where did you get that.
32 terms. Something missing or wrong? Tell us.