Free tool
Never run a creator’s video past its rights again
A free tracker for every creator license you hold. Note what you can do with each video, where, and until when. We email you 30 days and 7 days before rights run out, so nothing keeps running by accident.
✓ Free✓ No password✓ Reminders at 30 and 7 days✓ Import your spreadsheet
The risk nobody is tracking
Music gets the headlines, but expired creator rights are the other way brands get burned. You pay a creator for a video and agree you can use it for 90 days. The video works, so someone turns it into a Spark Ad or a partnership ad. Months later it’s still running. The creator notices, and now you’re negotiating from a weak spot.
This happens because the license lives in an email thread or a contract PDF, and the ad lives in an ad manager run by someone else. Nobody connects the two. The person who signed the deal may have left. The agency may have changed. The ad keeps spending because it’s performing.
There’s a well-known version of this outside social media. In Olive v. General Nutrition Centers, a California case, GNC kept using a model’s photos after his one-year usage term ended. The court awarded him over $1.1 million, plus a share of profits, far more than the original fee of $4,800. Creator videos aren’t identical to modeling photos, but the lesson carries over: using someone’s content or likeness past what you paid for can cost many times the original deal.
What the tracker does
- One row per license. Creator handle, the post, start and end dates, whether you have paid rights, organic rights or both, the platforms, the fee and any notes.
- Reminders before it ends. We email you 30 days and 7 days before each end date. You can turn reminders off for any row.
- Active and expired at a glance. See which rights are live and which have ended, so you know what to pause today.
- Bulk import and export. Already have a spreadsheet? Import it as a CSV. You can export everything back out anytime.
- A private link for your team. No password. We email you a private link, and anyone you share it with can view and edit, so social, partnerships and paid media all look at the same list.
How reminders work
Thirty days gives you time to ask the creator about renewal while the ad is still doing well, which is when you have the best chance of a fair price. Seven days is the last call: renew, swap the creative, or pause. If you do nothing, the row turns to expired on the end date so it’s obvious in the list.
Set it up in ten minutes
- Start a tracker. Enter your work email and brand name. We email you a private link right away.
- Add your licenses. Type them in one by one, or import a CSV with columns for creator, post link, start, end, paid, organic, platforms, fee and notes.
- Share the link. Send it to whoever runs paid social and partnerships. Everyone works from the same list.
- Act on the emails. When a reminder lands, renew the rights or pause anything that’s running as an ad.
A typical week with the tracker
Here’s how it plays out. Priya runs creator partnerships for a supplements brand with about 30 active creators. On Monday she gets an email: three licenses end in 30 days. Two are organic-only reposts, which she’s happy to let lapse, so she makes a note to take the reposts down. The third, from a creator named Maya, is the brand’s best Spark Ad.
Priya messages Maya that afternoon and agrees to a six-month extension for paid use. She updates the end date in the tracker. Total time: twenty minutes. Without the reminder, that ad would have kept running past its end date with nobody noticing until the creator did.
What to record for each creator
The tracker is only as good as what goes in it. For each license, get these straight from the contract or the email where you agreed terms:
Organic rights
Can you repost the video on your own accounts? For how long? Many deals allow organic reposts for longer than paid use, sometimes forever, but don’t assume it.
Paid rights
Can you run it as an ad, whether that’s a Spark Ad, partnership ad or whitelisted ad? This is usually the shortest and most expensive right, and the one that gets missed.
End date
The single most important field. If the contract says “90 days from posting,” write down the actual date. Vague terms are how ads outlive their rights.
Not sure how long these terms usually run, or how to write them into a deal? Our guide on how long you can run a creator’s video covers typical terms, and there’s a fill-in-the-blanks license template you can take to your lawyer.
Want us to check what’s already live?
The tracker helps you manage rights going forward. It can’t tell you which creator videos are already running past their terms, or which ones have music that isn’t cleared for brand use. That’s what an OKtoRun audit does. We check your posts, creator content and boosted ads, and mark each one green, yellow or red with a fix. Audits start at $500 for up to 100 posts, and they’re free if we find nothing to fix. Or start with a free account check to see how many red posts you have.
Today we check music and creator rights. Stock footage, images and AI likeness are coming soon.
Common questions
Is the tracker really free?
Yes. It’s free to use with no limit we expect a brand to hit. We built it because expired creator rights are a real risk and most teams track them in scattered spreadsheets.
Do I need an account or password?
No. You enter your work email and brand name, and we email you a private link. Anyone with the link can view and edit, so only share it inside your team.
When do reminders go out?
By email, 30 days and 7 days before each license’s end date. You can switch reminders off for any row.
Can I import my existing spreadsheet?
Yes. Import a CSV with columns for creator, post link, start, end, paid, organic, platforms, fee and notes. You can export everything back to CSV anytime.
Does the tracker pause my ads?
No. It doesn’t connect to your ad accounts. It tells you when rights are ending so you or your team can renew or pause in time.
Does a TikTok Spark Ads code mean I have the rights?
Not necessarily. The code gives you technical access to run the post as an ad for the period the creator picked in the app. Your rights come from your agreement with the creator, which may be shorter or narrower. Track the agreement, not just the code.
Related
General information, not legal advice. Platform rules and licenses change; check the current terms or ask your lawyer about your situation. Lawsuit figures are as reported and represent claims, not findings, unless noted.