Short-form distribution glossary

Plain definitions for the terms used in creator distribution, clipping, UGC and Roblox marketing — including the ones the industry uses to mean several different things.

Clipping: Clipping is a marketing model where independent creators cut short videos from a brand’s footage, post them on their own accounts, and are paid based on the views those videos earn. It is distinct from the Roblox exploit of the same name, which is a movement glitch and unrelated to marketing.
Creator distribution: Creator distribution is paying many independent creators to post their own videos about a product, priced on the views each video earns rather than on a fixed fee per creator. The defining feature is volume of different videos from one brief, rather than reach from one named account.
UGC: UGC in advertising means video a creator produces for a brand in the style of an organic post, which the brand then runs as paid advertising on its own channels. Despite the name it usually does not involve content users made independently, and it buys creative rather than distribution — the brand still has to pay for the impressions.
CPM: CPM is the cost of one thousand advertising impressions. An impression counts when an ad is served, whether or not anyone watched it, which is why CPM is not directly comparable with a cost per thousand views of a published video.
Cost per thousand views: Cost per thousand views is the price paid for a thousand views of a published video, counted by the platform hosting it. Unlike CPM it is only charged on views that actually occurred on a real post, so the same headline number represents a stricter unit.
Roblox discovery: Roblox discovery is the system that decides which experiences Roblox shows to players. It responds to player behaviour — play-through rate, session length, early retention and return rate — rather than to advertising spend, so placement cannot be bought directly.
Play-through rate: Play-through rate is the share of players shown a game’s tile on Roblox who go on to start playing it. It is largely determined by the icon and title, which makes both of them gates on the value of every impression a game receives.
Creative fatigue: Creative fatigue is the decline in performance of an advertisement or video as the same audience sees it repeatedly. It happens within days on short-form platforms, which is why volume of different creatives matters more than the quality of any single one.
Approved view: An approved view is a view on a post that passed review and counts toward a campaign’s delivery. Posts that ignore the brief, misrepresent the product, or duplicate another creator’s cut are rejected, and their views are not counted or paid.
Withdrawn post: A withdrawn post is a video that previously counted toward a campaign and is no longer live — usually deleted by the creator or removed by the platform. Its views are removed from the campaign total rather than left in place, which means an honest campaign figure can go down as well as up.
Owned channels: Owned channels are the social accounts a brand controls and posts from itself. They are reported separately from creator distribution because the two are different kinds of work, and combining them hides which one is producing the result.
Baseline: A baseline is a post’s view count recorded at the moment a reporting period opens, so that only views earned after that point are credited to the new period. Without one, a video published months earlier would contribute its entire history to the current period’s figures.
Influencer marketing: Influencer marketing is paying a specific creator an agreed fee to post about a product, priced on the size of their audience. Reach is known in advance and the fee is paid regardless of how the post performs, which is the main difference from view-priced creator distribution.
Hook: A hook is the opening moment of a short-form video, usually its first three seconds, which determines whether a viewer keeps watching. Most of the performance difference between two edits of identical footage is decided here.