Agency contract red flags

The four clauses that matter most

• •Term and exit. How long does it run, how do you leave, and what notice is required? A contract with no clean exit is the single biggest problem, ahead of the revenue share.
• •Where the money lands. Payouts should reach your own account, and you should be paid the gross with the agency invoicing you — not the reverse. An agency collecting first and paying you second controls the tap.
• •Account ownership and access. The account, the handle and the audience must remain yours. Access should be delegated permissions, never your password.
• •Exclusivity and scope. What exactly are they exclusive over? Exclusivity across all platforms and all future work, indefinitely, is a very different deal from managing one account.

Specific things worth pausing on

• •Automatic renewal with a long notice window, particularly where notice can only be given in a narrow period.
• •Post-termination revenue claims — a share of your earnings after the agreement ends. Sometimes negotiable, often not disclosed prominently.
• •Penalties for leaving, especially amounts unrelated to any demonstrable loss.
• •Non-competes preventing you working in the industry at all after leaving. Enforceability varies enormously by jurisdiction, and an unenforceable clause still deters people who do not know that.
• •A requirement to hand over your login rather than delegated access.
• •Content ownership assigning copyright in your own material to the agency.
• •No defined obligations on their side. An agreement listing everything you must do and nothing they must deliver is not a service agreement.

On revenue share

Shares vary widely and there is no single standard, whatever anyone tells you. What makes a share reasonable is what sits opposite it: a 50% share for a full operation — messaging, editing, scheduling, marketing, paid promotion — is a different proposition from 50% for advice and a group chat.

Judge the share against defined deliverables. A high share with clear obligations and a clean exit is safer than a lower share with neither.

Before you sign

• •Have a lawyer read it. An hour costs far less than a bad twelve months, and this is exactly the kind of contract where one clause decides everything.
• •Get every verbal promise into the document. "We would never actually enforce that" is not a term.
• •Ask to speak to two current creators, and one who left. The second conversation is the informative one.
• •Check the entity is real and find out who is behind it.
• •Never sign under time pressure. Urgency on a long-term contract is a negotiating tactic, not a circumstance.

If you have already signed something bad

Do not simply stop performing — breaching first weakens your position. Get advice on what the agreement actually binds you to, because unenforceable clauses are common and people comply with them out of uncertainty.

Meanwhile, secure what you can control: your account email, two-factor authentication, payout details, and delegated access rather than shared credentials.