Terms of Service

THE SHORT VERSIONWhat you are agreeing to

• The rates are published and not negotiated. Nobody is paid a different rate for the same work, and nothing on this page can be varied by a side deal.
• A slot is a real reservation, and a floor. Once a production approves you, $50 is set aside in your name for seven days. Nobody else can take it — and if your post earns more than $50, what is held for you grows to match.
• Every post is checked by a person against six named checks. A post that fails comes back with which check and why, and you can fix it and resubmit.
• Money earned is yours. Closing your account does not forfeit it. Neither does a disagreement with us.
• Every post must say it is paid. This is the one rule with no exceptions, for anyone, ever.

1This agreement

These terms are between you and HALO. They apply when you make an account, take a slot, fund a pool, or use filmsonhalo.com in any way. The Privacy Policy and the disclosure guide form part of them.

If you accept these on behalf of a company or a production, you are saying you have authority to do that, and "you" then means that organisation.

We may change these terms. If a change matters — the rates, the fee, what is required of you, or how disputes are handled — we will email you at least 14 days before it takes effect, and it will not apply to a campaign or a slot already in progress. A change you do not accept is a reason to close your account, and closing it does not cost you any money already earned.

2What HALO is, and what it is not

HALO decides things, and stands behind those decisions. We check that an account belongs to a real person before it can take a slot. We check every post against the six checks and we decide whether it passes. We calculate what is owed, and nobody is paid until we have said it passed. Those are our decisions, made by our people, and we are answerable for them — which is why every one of them is recorded, explained in words, and appealable.

HALO is not your employer, and not a party to the creative relationship. A creator on HALO is an independent contractor. Nothing here creates employment, partnership, agency or a joint venture. We do not direct how you make a post, we do not set your hours, and you are free to work with anyone else, including on the same platforms, at the same time.

HALO does not guarantee performance. We do not promise a production any number of views, any level of engagement, any festival outcome or any commercial result, and we do not promise a creator that a campaign will be available or that a slot will be offered. What we guarantee is the mechanism: the pool is real, the reservation is real, the checks are run, and the report is auditable.

A pool is committed to a campaign, and drawn down against verified views. It is committed when the campaign goes live and it cannot be reduced or withdrawn after that. What HALO does with a pool is decide against it, not hold it. We calculate what is owed, we decide whether a post passed, and we instruct the payment — and we describe that with those words rather than with escrow, trust or custody, because those words would mean something we do not do. §11 sets out what is final and what is not.

3Accounts

• You must be 18 or over.
• One account per person, and one per production. Opening a second to get around a closure lets us reclaim anything in it.
• The information you give us has to be true, including your handle, your country and your address. A verification that fails because the information was false is a closure, not a re-check.
• The account is yours to keep secure. Tell us straight away at hello@filmsonhalo.com if you think someone else is in it.
• An account is checked by a person before it can take a slot. We may decline to verify an account, and we will say why.

4The published numbers

These apply to every campaign and every creator. They are not negotiable by either side, and a production cannot offer more or a creator ask for more.

The rate is applied to verified views — the number a person at HALO could confirm, not the number the post displays. Where those differ, the difference and the reason are shown to you both.

Currency

Every figure on HALO is in United States dollars — the rate, the hold, the pool, the cashout minimum, the fee, and every number on every screen. There is no second currency and nothing is converted anywhere in HALO.

If your bank or PayPal account is in another currency, it converts on arrival at its own rate and may charge its own fee. That rate and that fee are your provider's, not ours, and we have no part in setting either — which is why the amount that lands can differ slightly from the amount HALO shows as paid.

5Slots

You apply to a campaign, or a production invites you. Either way a production has to approve you before anything is held. Nobody posts about a film without the production saying yes.

When you are approved, $50 is reserved in your name for seven days. In that window the money cannot be given to anyone else and cannot be withdrawn by the production. If you have not submitted a post by the end of it, the slot lapses and the money returns to the pool. Nothing is recorded against you for letting one lapse, and you can apply again.

You may hold one slot per campaign. The $50 is a floor, not a ceiling and not a fee. What you earn is the rate applied to your verified views. If that comes to less than $50, the difference returns to the pool. If it comes to more, the amount held for you grows to meet it, as far as the campaign's remaining money allows — and once it is awarded it is yours.

One consequence worth being straight about: the money above your $50 is not reserved for anybody, so it goes to whoever earns it first. Your $50 cannot be taken by another creator under any circumstances. What is above it is not guaranteed to anyone, including you.

Every campaign publishes a maximum for one creator, and it is shown to you before you take the slot. By default it is a third of the pool — $100 on a $300 campaign, $1,666 on a $5,000 one — and a production may set it higher, or remove it. It exists so that one creator cannot empty a campaign that other people are still working on. It is not the old $50 cap: it scales with the campaign, and on the smallest campaign HALO runs it is still twice what that cap was.

If your post earns past it, you may ask the production to lift it for you, once. They may say yes or no, and if they say no they have to tell you why. A no is a no to more. It is never a no to what you have already earned — that money is in your balance before the question is asked, and nothing in this agreement lets anybody take it back. The maximum is published before you post for exactly that reason: so that the only thing left to decide afterwards is the upside.

A slot is not transferable, and the post has to be made by you, from the account you verified. You may not delegate it.

6Your post

• It goes on the account you verified, on the platform the campaign is for.
• It must include whatever the production's brief specifies — usually a caption line and the film's title — and it must genuinely be about the film.
• It must carry the platform's own paid-partnership setting, and #ad or #sponsored in the first two lines of the caption. Both. See the disclosure guide for why the platform's own toggle is not enough on its own.
• It has to stay live. Taking a post down before the campaign closes means the views can no longer be verified, and an award already made on it can be reversed.
• The opinion is yours. A production may require the caption line and may not require you to be positive about the film. If one asks you to say something you do not believe, tell us — that is a breach by them, not by you.

You keep your content. Posting for a campaign gives the production a licence to view the post, to include it in its own reporting, and to link to or embed it while the campaign is live. It does not transfer copyright, it does not let them run your post as a paid advertisement, and it does not let them re-cut it. Anything beyond that is a separate agreement between you and them, made outside HALO, and HALO takes no part in it and no cut of it.

You give HALO a licence to hold your post's link and metrics for as long as the privacy policy says, and to show your public profile to productions. We do not licence your content to anyone else, and we do not train models on it.

7The six checks

A person runs all six on every submission. They are the same six for everyone, and we do not waive any of them for anyone.

1. The platform's paid-partnership setting is on.
2. The disclosure is in the caption, in the first two lines.
3. The required caption content is present, as the brief specified.
4. The view count can be verified — read from the platform where your account is connected, or from the screen recording of your own analytics that you upload. A recording, not a screenshot: a still image is too easy to edit and too hard to date, which is why HALO gives you a six-character code to hold on screen while you film.
5. The post is still live and public at the time of review.
6. The film is genuinely in the post, and the post is not something else with a mention attached.

A submission that fails comes back with which check failed and what to do about it. You keep your slot and you keep your ceiling. Fix it and submit again. Most people fail one at least once and nothing is held against you for it.

We will not approve a post that fails a check, including where a production asks us to. Money moves only after all six pass.

8Appeals

If you think a decision is wrong, you can appeal it. One free re-review per submission, within 14 days of the decision. Tell us the figure your platform is showing and attach the analytics screen that shows it — that is what actually settles a disagreement about a number.

A different person looks at it. If we were wrong, we correct it and pay the difference. If we were right, we say why in words, and the original decision stands. An appeal we uphold never costs you anything and never affects your record.

9Getting paid

• An approved submission is awarded at $2.00 per 1,000 verified views — growing the amount held for you if it exceeds it and the campaign can afford it — and the award moves from held to available.
• We pay by PayPal, to the address on your account, once your available balance reaches $20.
• The $20 is a minimum for a cashout you ask for. It is not a minimum for getting your money. If you close your account, if we close it, if you go quiet for a long time, or when the pilot ends, we pay you the whole balance — whatever it comes to, whether that is $19 or 40 cents. You never have to reach a threshold to be paid what you earned; the threshold only decides when you can ask for it early.
• You can see, at any time, what has been paid, what is available, what is still held, and exactly how far you are from the $20 minimum.
• We may reverse an award where the post is deleted or made private before the campaign closes, where the views turn out to have been bought or automated, or where the submission was fraudulent. We will always say which, and you can appeal it. We do not reverse an award because a production changed its mind.
• A reversal is set against your balance. If the balance does not cover it we may set it against future earnings. We do not send anyone a bill.
• You earn no interest on a balance held for you, and neither does HALO.
• If we cannot reach you to pay you, we hold the balance. We never absorb it. If an account has been dormant for a long time we will try to reach you at the address on file before doing anything, and where the law requires an unclaimed balance to be handed to a state authority, that is where it goes — not to us.

10Tax

You are an independent contractor, not an employee. What you earn on HALO is your income, and determining, reporting and paying the tax on it is yours — including any sales tax, VAT or social contribution your own country charges on what you do. We do not withhold, except where a law requires us to, and nothing on HALO is tax advice.

Before your first payout we will ask you for some tax information: your legal name, your address, the country you are tax-resident in, and a tax identification number where the country you or we are in requires one. Which document that is depends on where each of us is, so we will tell you exactly what is needed rather than guess it here. A payout can be held while we wait for it. It is never forfeited, and the balance stays yours the whole time.

We may be required to report amounts paid to you to a tax authority, and in some cases to withhold. If either applies to you we will say so before the first payment, not after it.

11The pool

• A campaign starts at $300 and you choose how it is split across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. Each platform's share draws down on its own.
• Every reservation holds $50, so a pool can carry pool ÷ 50 slots at once — six on a $300 pool, a hundred on a $5,000 one. That is a ceiling on how many creators can hold a slot simultaneously, not a promise about how many will be paid: a creator who earns more than $50 takes more of the pool, so a campaign that performs well reaches fewer creators. We tell you both numbers before you fund it.
• You set the maximum one creator can earn, before the campaign opens. The default is a third of the pool. You may raise it, or remove it entirely, and whatever you choose is shown to every creator before they take a slot. You may also lift it for one creator who asks — but you cannot lower it afterwards, and you cannot use it to avoid paying for views that have already been verified.
• The pool locks when the campaign goes live. It cannot be topped up, reduced or clawed back. That is what makes a creator's reservation mean something, and it is the single most important promise on this page.
• All sales are final. The fee is paid when the campaign goes live and is not refunded, and a funded pool is not refundable, reducible or convertible back into money once creators can reserve against it. A campaign that reaches fewer creators than you hoped, or performs less well than you hoped, is not a ground for a refund.
• HALO does not hold your pool and does not take what is left of it. Whatever is still uncommitted when a campaign closes has never been ours and does not become ours. We are paid by our fee and by nothing else — there is no underspend line in our revenue, and we would have to change this page to create one.
• You will not initiate a chargeback on a funded pool. If something is wrong, tell us — a chargeback against money already reserved in creators' names takes it from them, not from us, and we treat it as a fundamental breach.

12The fee

HALO charges 26% of the pool, on top of the pool. A $300 pool costs $378, a $1,000 pool costs $1,260. Every cent of the pool is available to creators — the fee is ours and nothing is taken from what a creator earns.

It is one number and it covers everything, including the cost of moving the money. Card processing on the way in and payout fees on the way out come out of our 26%, not out of your pool and not out of anybody's earnings. There is no separate processing line and no charge that appears later.

The fee is charged when the campaign goes live and is not refundable. It is not pro-rated against what gets awarded: it pays for running the campaign — the verification, the decisions, the appeals and the report — not for each dollar that happens to reach a creator. A campaign that spends less than its pool still pays the fee it was quoted. The one exception is a campaign that never goes live: if we never open it to creators, the fee is refunded in full, because we never did the thing the fee is for.

13Briefs and approval

• You approve every creator. Nobody posts about your film unless you said yes.
• You may require a caption line, the title, a hashtag and a link. You may not require a creator to express a particular opinion, and you may not ask a creator to leave out or soften the paid disclosure. Either of those is a breach of these terms.
• A brief must be lawful, must not require anything a platform's own rules forbid, and must not require an unpaid extra beyond the post itself.
• You warrant that the film, the artwork and anything else you supply is yours to supply, and you indemnify HALO and the creator against a claim that it was not.
• Assets you give a creator are licensed to that creator for that campaign only, and that licence ends when the campaign does.

14What you may do with a creator's post

Funding a campaign does not buy the content. It buys the post being made, and a limited licence: to view it, to link to or embed it, and to include it and its figures in your own reporting to financiers, festivals, sales agents and distributors, for as long as you need that record.

It does not include running the post as paid advertising, whitelisting or boosting it, re-editing it, using it in a trailer or on packaging, or any use after the campaign that is not reporting. Those are worth buying and creators are often glad to sell them — but the deal is between you and the creator, made outside HALO, and HALO does not take a percentage of it.

15What is not allowed

The list is short because most of it is obvious. Everything on it results in a submission being refused, and a repeat or a serious instance results in closure.

• Bought, automated or incentivised views, likes, comments or followers, on a HALO post or on the account used to take a slot. This includes engagement pods and any service that supplies traffic.
• Misrepresenting a number — an edited screenshot, a figure from a different post, or a claim you know to be wrong.
• Multiple accounts, or an account for a person other than the one who verified.
• Omitting, hiding or later removing the paid disclosure, and — for a production — asking anyone to.
• Content that is unlawful, infringing, hateful, sexual, or which features an identifiable person without their consent. Where a person under 18 appears, you need their parent's or guardian's consent.
• Anything a platform's own rules forbid. TikTok's, Instagram's and Facebook's terms apply to your post as well as ours.
• Interfering with HALO: scraping, automated access, probing, or attempting to reach another account's data.

16Going around HALO

If a production and a creator meet through HALO, we ask that campaign work between them goes through HALO for six months from the day they were introduced.

Two things this is not. It is not a claim on the rest of your professional life: you may work with each other on anything that is not a HALO-style paid campaign — a licensing deal for the post, a hire, a friendship — immediately and freely, and you never owe HALO a percentage of it. And it is not enforced with a fee: there is no buy-out, no conversion charge, and no invoice. It is a term of using HALO, and the consequence of breaking it is that you stop being able to.

Six months, rather than the two years the large marketplaces use, because HALO's contribution here is finding and verifying a person, and that value does not last two years.

17Suspension and closure

We may suspend an account while we look into something, and we will tell you that we have and why. We may close an account for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, or where the law requires it. For anything else, we will give 30 days' notice.

You may close your account at any time, from Account.

What happens to money:

• Money you have earned is paid to you. Closure by either side does not forfeit it, including where we closed the account for breach. The exception is narrow and specific: an award traceable to fraud or bought engagement is reversed, because it was never earned. Everything else is paid.
• A pool we stopped you from spending is not ours to keep. If HALO closes your account or ends a campaign before it has run, whatever has not been committed to a creator goes back to you. That is us undoing our own decision — it is not a refund on a campaign that ran, and §11 still applies to those.
• A slot you were holding is released to the campaign.
• A campaign already running finishes. Closure does not strand a creator mid-campaign.

If you think a closure was wrong, write to hello@filmsonhalo.com. A person who was not involved in the decision will look at it and reply in writing within 15 business days.

18Liability

HALO is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we are not responsible for a platform changing its API, its rules or its numbers.

We are responsible for our own decisions and for money we hold. Nothing here limits our liability to pay you what you have earned, or our liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else the law does not permit us to limit.

Otherwise, and to the extent the law allows: neither side is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, revenue or goodwill; and HALO's total liability arising out of these terms is limited to the greater of $500 and the total fees you paid HALO, or the total we paid you, in the six months before the claim.

A production and a creator each indemnify HALO against claims arising from their own content, their own breach of these terms, and their own failure to disclose a paid post.

19Disputes

Between a creator and a production. HALO is the record of what happened, and we will show both sides the same ledger. Where the dispute is about whether a post passed a check, our decision under section 7 and the appeal under section 8 settle it. Where it is about something outside HALO — a licensing deal, an unpaid extra, a falling-out — that is between the two of you and HALO is not a party to it.

With HALO. Email us first at hello@filmsonhalo.com and give us 30 days to fix it. Most of what reaches us is a misunderstanding about a number, and almost all of it is settled by showing the working.

If that fails, these terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, and the courts of New York County have jurisdiction — except that either of us may bring a claim in a small-claims court instead, and nothing stops either of us seeking an injunction to protect intellectual property. If you are a consumer in the UK or the EU, this does not take away your right to bring a claim where you live, or the protection of your own country's mandatory law.

20General

• These terms, the Privacy Policy and the campaign details you agreed to are the whole agreement between us.
• If a court finds part of this unenforceable, the rest still stands.
• Not enforcing something once does not waive it.
• You may not assign your account. We may assign these terms to a successor of the business, and would tell you.
• Nothing here creates rights for anyone who is not a party to it.

Questions about any of this: hello@filmsonhalo.com. If a sentence here is unclear, that is worth telling us — a term nobody can follow is not a term, it is a trap, and we would rather rewrite it.