Hourly UGC sessions vs paying per video: when to use each
Two ways to pay for UGC on HourlyUGC, what each one is good at, and a plain rule for picking between them campaign by campaign.
Hourly session
- One creator, booked hours
- Videos come out of the session
- You agree the shape in the chat
Per video
- Many creators, one price
- Each approval pays one slot
- A declined slot comes back
Most UGC platforms give you one way to pay: a price per finished video. We give you that, and we also let you book a creator by the hour. Brands that run both tend to stop asking which is better and start asking which fits this campaign. This post is the rule of thumb we give them, with the mechanics of each model as they work in the product today.
What an hourly session is
When you create a campaign and pick Hourly as the way creators get paid, the card says it plainly: book hours, and every session ends in videos. Creators apply to the campaign. You read their profiles, their past work and their rate, and you pick who to hire. Hiring is an offer with two numbers, the rate and the hours. The money for the session is held the moment you send it and paid when you mark the session done.
There is no agreed count of videos in a session. That is deliberate. The shape of the work is talked through in the chat, where you can send the creator the styles you want filmed, and she films as many takes and variations as the hours allow. A session is closer to a half-day with a freelancer than to an order from a catalogue, and that is where its value comes from: you get volume and variation from one person who understands the product by the second hour.
What paying per video is
Pick Per video and the campaign becomes a pool of slots. You set the price a video and how many videos you want, and you can fund the pool now or when you are ready: creators can join in the meantime. Videos arrive, you review each one in the player, and the decision is the payment. Approve, and one slot pays out to the creator. Request changes, and the video goes back to her with your note. Decline, and the slot comes back to the pool for someone else. The plus on the campaign adds more slots whenever you want them.
The important property is that you only ever pay for what you keep. The second is that the price a creator saw when she uploaded is the price that video pays, even if you change the slot price later for the next ones. Both make per video the safer default when you are working with faces you have not worked with before.
The honest comparison
| Hourly session | Per video | |
|---|---|---|
| Who | One creator you chose and hired | Any creator who joins and delivers |
| You pay for | Hours, held at hire and released when you mark it done | Approved videos, one slot each |
| Output | Several videos from one session, shape agreed in chat | Finished videos against the brief, one at a time |
| Risk | The hours are spent whether you love every take or not | None on the videos you decline |
| Best for | Volume and variation from a face you trust | Breadth: many faces, many angles, pay for keepers |
| Where it lives | The campaign chat and the session | The Submissions lane and the Library |
When hourly wins
- You already know the creator. A second or third campaign with someone whose first videos you approved is where hourly pays off: no onboarding, and the hours go into footage, not into learning the product.
- You want raw material, not only finished ads. Teams with an editor in-house use sessions to get b-roll, alternate hooks and talking-head variations they cut themselves. A per-video brief is a worse fit for that, because every upload is judged as a finished piece.
- The shape is still moving. If you are going to change the angle after seeing the first take, a conversation in the chat beats declining uploads. Hourly is built for the brand that directs.
- You want a predictable spend per creator. Rate times hours is the whole cost, known before anyone films.
When per video wins
- You need many faces on one brief. A product with a wide audience wants a mother, a student and a runner, not one creator in three outfits. Per video lets all of them join and film without you hiring each one.
- You are testing creators. The first video is the audition. The slot pays only if you approve it, so a weak first upload costs you a decline and nothing else.
- The brief is tight. When the hook, the beats and the close are written in the brief as styles, creators film the shape and you judge the result. You do not need to be in the room.
- You want the videos to flow straight into ads. Approved per-video uploads sit in the Library with their rights, which is what Build Ads lists when you launch them from your own Meta account. The post on going from an approved video to a live ad covers that path.
- You want volume from one creator
- You will refine the shape as you go
- Raw footage you edit yourself is fine
- You want a predictable cost per session
- You want many faces on one brief
- You will only pay for what you keep
- You need finished videos, not footage
- You want creators to join on their own
Run both, in the right order
The pattern we see most in accounts that stay active is per video first, then hourly. The first campaign is a per-video pool with a tight brief and a reasonable price. It brings in a wide set of creators and a wide set of videos, and the approvals tell you who gets the product. The second campaign is hourly, with offers sent to the two or three creators whose videos you kept, and the session is where volume comes from.
Both kinds of campaign can carry the same extras. Samples and buy & rebate are added from the campaign with Add features, so a creator in either model can ask for the product or buy it and be paid back, which is covered in the post on buy & rebate campaigns. And either base can add a creator share of ad spend on top, so a video you approved and then ran as an ad keeps paying the person who made it, as the commission-based post explains.
Three mistakes to skip
- Hiring hourly from a profile alone. A profile tells you how someone looks on camera, not whether she reads a brief. Let one per-video upload do the audition.
- Treating a session like an order. If you need exactly four videos of exactly sixty seconds, write that as a per-video brief with styles. A session is for direction and volume, not for counting.
- Leaving the pool unfunded for weeks. Creators join an unfunded pool and wait. Fund it when you are ready to review, so the first uploads land while the brief is fresh.
Whichever model you pick, the approvals, the Library and the ads path are the same, and so is the payments and invoicing side: creators are paid from the campaign, and you never chase an invoice. Briefs, hiring and sessions are described on the briefs and scheduling page, and the high-volume UGC page shows how teams combine the two at scale.