What is creator whitelisting?

Running paid ads through a creator’s account, so the ad appears under their name. Also called allowlisting or partnership ads.

With whitelisting, a creator lets a brand, or whoever buys its media, run ads from the creator’s handle. The post looks like the creator’s own, which tends to feel more at home in the feed, but there’s targeting and a paid budget behind it. Each platform has its own name for this, and the industry has been moving toward the word allowlisting.

It blurs a line most reports rely on. The creator report may count the post’s total views and code uses as the creator’s results. The paid-media report may count the same post’s conversions as paid results. Both describe one piece of content and one group of buyers. The creator’s own pull and the paid boost need to be separated before you judge either one.

Why it matters

A whitelisted post mixes creator content and paid media, so the creator report and the paid-media report can both count the same results.

An example

Example (made-up numbers): a creator post earns 50,000 organic views. The brand then spends $5,000 to push it to 400,000 more people. The creator report shows 450,000 views and 300 code uses. The paid-media report shows 250 conversions from the same post. Matched against your own numbers, there were 320 buyers in total.

Where it misleads

Judging a creator on whitelisted results. Most of the reach was bought, so the numbers say more about the media budget than about the creator’s audience.

How Arcus handles it

We separate organic and paid results for creator posts, match both to your own numbers, and count each buyer once, so decisions about each creator rest on the audience they bring.

More in our guide: Creator campaigns: how to tell what worked