How much do YouTubers charge for brand deals?

0:00The Colin and Samir Show is supported by Microsoft Copilot. This is something I thought I would never say, but can I share with you my favorite prompt? I mean, like when you say something like that, I have to say yes. Were you going to say no? No, but okay. Just let me hear it. So when I'm researching for a guest or I need to know a lot about a subject matter, I say, make me a podcast about. And when you do that, you're going to get a short blurb about that subject. And then in like two minutes, you're going to get a podcast. So check this out. Welcome to Co-Pilot Podcasts. Picture this, a guy working the front desk at a hotel, making lacrosse videos in his spare time, completely unaware that he's about to become one of the most influential voices in the creator economy.

0:38Today, we're diving into the remarkable story of Colin Rosenblum. Wow. Did you pay it to say that? That's crazy. That's very kind. It's crazy, but it's my favorite way to learn about a subject matter. I'm learning about so much more now that I can turn this research into like a seven minute podcast that I can listen to just when I'm walking. Did you tell it that I worked at the front desk of a hotel? Dude, the prompt is just, make me a podcast about Colin from Colin and Samir. That's it. I may be biased, but I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm hooked. So if you guys haven't checked out Copilot, check it out, try it for your research, try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas.

1:15It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show. How much do YouTubers charge for brand deals? That's a question that we answer on today's episode of the show, which is dedicated to your questions about brand deals. And we start the show by breaking down a pretty big announcement about the show. All right, if you make it to the deep end, let us know. All right, the brand deal extravaganza episode. This episode is all about your questions about brand deals. And you guys asked us a lot, which is great. And it makes sense. That is the majority of how creators make money.

1:50So I would imagine there'd be a lot of questions. Yeah, I'm excited to answer these. But first, an announcement from us. So our Discord is officially live. The link is in the description. You can join it right now. We've been talking about this launch for weeks on the show. We've been planning this out for months. It's something that we've wanted for a very long time, and it's officially live. Something that's very cool about launching a Discord is that you kind of just like doors are open and it's like, let's see what happens. Yeah, it's not like we pull all the strings, right? When you launch a Discord, and that's what's so interesting.

2:23It's like with every member that joins, people get to make recommendations, new channels get added, and there become new use cases for this community. Yeah, we've been chatting a lot internally and with our mods about what we want the Discord to be. And, you know, there's a certain extent where we can say, here's the channels that we think make sense. Here's the intention for the Discord. But really, it's going to be defined by all of you, the people who join it, what you find valuable in it. Now, I want to talk through, you know, some of the channels, what our intention is with it, and then actually our broader partnership with Discord.

2:59Discord has actually come on to be a sponsor of this show. And that's been a really cool journey as well and happened extremely organically. Earlier this year, we left the LinkedIn podcast network and we wanted to keep this show going and we didn't really know exactly how we wanted to monetize. You know, you guys have heard us in the past couple of weeks talk about paywalls, talked about different versions of how to bring funding to the show. And one of the first brands to reach out was Discord. They were authentic members of our community. They were listening to the show. And they wanted to, you know, talk to us about launching Discord.

3:36And that came at a time where we were already having those conversations internally. Yeah, that was super exciting because we were talking about having a community-based show. Yeah. One that doesn't necessarily rely on the algorithm as much as just the community coming back to this place every time. and, you know, during those early stages, we were also talking about who would be the right sponsor if we were to bring on a sponsor. Yeah. And when Discord reached out, it was like, oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Clearly, they were listening to that episode of the show when we're talking about having a community-based place for our audience.

4:12There's a really great Seth Godin quote that I've been thinking about a lot recently and it's, a group needs only two things to become a tribe. a shared interest and a way to communicate. And I think something that's really interesting about this community is like, we all have a shared interest, right? We're all creators. We're all interested in expressing ourselves on the internet, making YouTube videos, you know, growing our platforms, expressing our creativity and a way to communicate. Now there's many ways to communicate on the internet. There's YouTube comments. You can leave a comment on this video.

4:45You can tweet at us. You can post in our subreddit. There's a lot of different ways to communicate. But the one thing that I think was missing from our communication was a way for the community to talk to each other and to do that in curated ways, like in specific environments where we were noticing that, you know, if you guys send us a question and if we don't answer it on the show, you know, there's a possibility a question doesn't get answered. But the opportunity now that we have this Discord server is we have a channel dedicated to creator support questions. That's going to be the primary place where we pull questions for this show now.

5:22So if you join the Discord server, you want to ask a question, you can do a video question in there. You can also do a text-based question. But the opportunity is that if you're in the server and you have the answer to that question, you can actually pop in and answer it. So the hope is that if we can't get to all the questions on the show, there can be an ongoing conversation in the Discord server asking questions, answering them, sharing insights, talking about what's going on in the world of creators. And that can be happening now in between our uploads. It can be happening on a more regular basis and it can happen between all of you.

5:55I think that's what's really cool is that it can happen in an active way where people can meet in the discord and actually chat back and forth. You're not going to get into a conversation in the YouTube comments where you're like, oh, this person happens to be on YouTube at the same time that I'm on YouTube and they're responding to me in real time. That just doesn't happen. Yeah. Right. You put out a YouTube video, people comment on it. And then when the next YouTube video comes out, that video is kind of like old news for the community, at least, right? It's not an active spot. So that's what's really exciting for me here is that people can actually like meet and interact.

6:26And we're also going to be doing other things with it. Like with Discord, you can go live, right? We're going to be doing a live AMA in there. That's going to happen on Monday, 3 p.m. Pacific. If you join the Discord, you'll get the invite. You can see the event there. So yeah, we can use voice video. We can go live. There's so many different ways for us to engage with the community on Discord. There's a lot of communities that exist on Discord. And I think joining some of those and engaging with creators on Discord has been a huge part of the past couple years of us even building relationships with creators, getting a pulse of what different communities are like on the internet.

7:01When we're exploring different niche worlds, typically you turn to Discord to see what the most engaged version of that community is and what the conversation is. So a lot of this is also part of our strategy and our philosophy that the next chapter of the creator economy is about depth. It's depth within your audience, depth within your community. It's saying, hey, here's these big viral moments that do sometimes happen on YouTube. Those are exciting. But what's really impactful for us is building a deep connection with a community. and that's what launching Discord is all about for us. Yeah, and I want to acknowledge too our subreddit, which has given us the majority of the questions up to this point for creator support and I think that still is an amazing place for the democratic voice of a singular group of people.

7:52For sure. Because of the upvotes, you can post a thread there and a month later, a post could gain traction and that's like what people want to know the most. But I think with Discord, we have this opportunity to be so much more multidimensional with how we can interact with the community and how they can interact with each other. I think there's one core difference between the two right now. And I want the subreddit to always be, you know, it wasn't created by us. That was created organically by our audience. The Discord is made by us. You know, the moderators are on our team. Our team members will be in there.

8:28It's an official Colin and Samir environment. That is a primary difference, right? We will be more engaged and active in our Discord server. That's where we will hang out. And, you know, I think that is something that we talk about when it comes to permission-based environments too, where it's like, here's an environment. If you want to join, you join. And now we have permission to, you know, engage with you. We have permission to host events there. We have all this interesting opportunity that sometimes algorithmic-based environments don't afford us. Like on YouTube with a thumbnail, we're trying to interrupt you.

9:01We're trying to be like, hey, stop. Look at this. Come over here. So even if you subscribe to us on YouTube, you're not necessarily always going to get our content or engage with us. But if you join the Discord, then you're inside of an environment where you're saying, hey, I'd like to sign up to be a part of this. And I've got something I want to say that I want to contribute. Yeah. Yeah. So the link is in the description. You can join the Discord. And one thing that we want to urge you guys to do, go into the introductions channel and introduce yourself. If you want to do it through a video, I think that would be really fun.

9:29like a 60 second video of like, here's who I am. Here's where I live. Here's the type of content I make. That would be awesome. And if you guys do make a video, I think we'll pick out our favorites and spotlight them on the show. Right? Yeah. So we have an introductions channel that you can pop into. We also have a gripes channel. Helpful for you guys. If you guys could add some gripes into that. Because I haven't had a gripe in at least three to four weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Life's been too good for gripes. Too good for you. But now I really want some gripes. So please. There's also server suggestions.

9:59So if you get into the server and you're like, hmm, I want to see this channel, then you can pop those in there. We have thumbnail feedback and video feedback. What we want to ask is that if you want to get feedback, be an active participant of those channels. Give feedback to people. I think that's a really important part of being a part of this community is be there to get advice, but also be there to give advice. We have Creator News. We have Colin and Smear episodes. We have Creator Spotlight, which is going to be a really cool channel where if you have a creator that you feel like we should know about or the community should know about, pop them in here.

10:32Then we have video suggestions. So if you want to guide us in a direction of like, hey, I want this topic to be covered or this creator to be interviewed on Colin and Samir's show, put that in there. This is something that we say a lot, which is creators build content with their audiences, not for them. And this is our first step in that direction to truly take that into consideration and build an environment where that can happen. so that is our intention with the discord now the discord does what the discord wants the discord does what the what did you say what the discord does what the discord well I'm just saying that's a tagline once you let it out of the cage whatever you know what I mean yeah it's loose it's loose here we go yeah let's see what happens we'll see you at the AMA you know 3pm on Monday so join the discord link is in the description and thank you so much to discord for partnering with us on this you're gonna see them show up not only on this channel, but also on the main channel.

11:27We'll be doing some events with Discord. Just have a really great deep partnership with them. They're authentic members of this community, and I think they're really ushering in the future of the creator economy. So appreciate the support. Now for some creator support for all of you. Question one. Okay, this first Brandy L-related question comes from YouTube, from Kiana L. Bandy. That's probably not how you say that name. We will find out. Hey, Colin and Samir. I'm an up-and-coming creator, and I would love some insight from you guys in the world of navigating and negotiating brand deals. I know you guys are very experienced in this subject matter and I want to know how it looked for you guys in different stages of your YouTube career.

12:05It's a good question. I think we can speak a bit in, you know, broad strokes of the different eras. But what I will say is that there's two forms of brand deals, inbound and outbound. Now, inbound brand deals means the brand is reaching out to you and an outbound brand deal is you reaching out to the brand. So those are like the two forms of communication. And what's really interesting is that as you start creating, typically if you're making something of value to a specific audience and the audience starts growing, you will start getting inbound. And inbound can look like many different forms.

12:44It could be an agency reaching out saying, hey, we represent brands. It can be a brand itself reaching out. But those inbound brand deals typically inform you of like what the market is. Outbound is when you like package up your own thing and you're like, hey, these are the types of sponsorships I sell and I want to go out to a brand. We tried going outbound quite a bit when we first started. We tried pitching to brands. But the thing that, you know, we noticed is that to go outbound, you do need to kind of have a presence. An audience. I think at that time, we thought the idea could win out over the audience.

13:23Yeah. Right? We would come up with somewhat elaborate pitches for videos that we could make for the brand on our channel. Yeah. And even if they liked the idea, that's not what was interesting to them. Right? We had yet to define our audience, really. Right. Our earliest inbound was actually gifting. Yeah, it was gifting. And specifically, it was Felix Grey sunglasses. Blue light glasses. Blue light glasses. and they said, we'll give you a couple pairs if you make a video about these. And we said yes. And the value there was us being able to figure out, what is it like for us to even integrate a brand on this new channel?

14:03Do we like the experience? Does our audience resonate with it? And we learned a lot from that experience of putting out that video because we dedicated the entire video to that brand. Which is not what they asked. Not what they asked. We spent a ton of time making a video essay about blue light glasses. that we did not need to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think we learned a little bit moving forward that, and also the ad market changed. Yeah. We came from a place of like, you got to make a custom video for a brand. And we learned from that. So what is a brand deal, right? A brand deal is a brand paying you money to access your audience.

14:38That's what's happening. You know, that's a very important concept to understand is that the value for them is to say, hey, I have a message. I'd like to use your content or travel alongside your content to your audience to deliver that message. So that means the audience has to be so specific that the brand understands why it would be valuable for them to reach that audience. And that's why what we notice is that very specific, as our audience got more and more specific, our inbound got more and more specific, right? Like when you first started, it was like, okay, these guys are pretty good at making videos.

15:15Here's some blue light glasses. Can you guys make a video with those? Yeah. And then I think the next brand we worked with was Skillshare. I think that deal was$800. And it was like, okay, that's like general. Okay. They have an audience, you know, of people who are online. They might want to learn. Okay. Skillshare. But at that time, I would say Skillshare probably would have taken anyone with a similar audience. Exactly. They might not have even known it was us. Yeah. That probably came through an agency and then got split up amongst a bunch of creators and we were some creators that ended up in that deal.

15:46And so as we got more and more and more defined of who our audience was and our audience grew, once our audience was so defined that it was like, hey, this is, we are speaking to creators. We are speaking to online creators. We're speaking to people like us, people who make YouTube videos. Then all of a sudden the brands that started reaching out were much more specific to that. Storyblocks. Is there a moment in time? Yeah, what moment was that for us? I think it was Storyblocks. Storyblocks and Musicbed, two brands that were really looking to say, hey, YouTube creators, here's a library of stock footage that you can use for your videos.

16:18And Musicbed, hey, here's a music library that you can use for your videos. Those two brands, I remember, was a turning point, an inflection point for us where it was like, oh, they understand what type of content we're making. So our inbound has now changed. So that's 2018, 2019. That was probably 2018, 2019. Yeah. And that's when our deals started to get into the$1 ,000 $4 ,000 range for a video. And, you know, even with a small audience, we were valued high because the audience was specific. So that's like my number one piece of advice for creators is specify the audience because if the audience is specific, then the advertisers become specific.

16:56And the more specific the audience, the more valuable you are to the advertiser. That's, you know, that's like a very simple concept in advertising, but our evolution and our different stages have gone from like, you know, mostly, uh, you know, outbound with nothing working to, you know, a slow ramp up of inbound gifting, small deals, more specific deals, audience growing and audience getting more specified, which means bigger and bigger deals. Right. Which are primarily inbound now, uh, which is great. Yep. You know, and we get to react to that. Or if we have something that we're like, Hey, we use this product.

17:34We want to reach out to that brand. Then we can do that. Okay, Savvy Tanjil says, love to watch a video about how much YouTubers charge for brand deals. So there's a couple different philosophies when it comes to charging. I'll just speak right now of like some of the highest rates I've seen. Some of the top tier creators are charging in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a brand integration. So the product being like a 60 to 90 second integration into their video could trade at like anywhere between 200 and$400 ,000. That's a lot of money. When compared to television advertising, it's not that much, but it's a lot of money because these are online creators.

18:17Their cost of production is lower, but their reach and their influence is really impactful, especially in that, when you're in like the 10 million plus view range. Now, that can range all the way down to, you know, like$50 ,000 depending on the brand and the audience fit. that audience fit is really important. When we first started kind of going outbound and developing our own media kit, meaning in the era of like the Colin and Samir show, once the show was defined and the audience was defined and we had more creator economy specific opportunities, how we defined our pricing, how we figured that out was we said, what's going out?

18:59meaning what's going out of our bank account. I wrote down in a very simple Google Excel sheet or Google spreadsheet, just like how much money did it cost for us to exist? Like how much money did each of us need? How much money was it for our rent? How much money were we spending on equipment, software, all of that? And then how much money needed to come in to cover that expense? And then how much money did we need to make a profit? So let's say we wanted to make like a 40 % profit. So that was like, you know, the base premise of our pricing philosophy. And I think that ended up being like$5 ,000 in integration is where we got to.

19:36And we just went out the gates and said, let's, we need to be pitching that in the market to see if anyone agrees to that. Is that actually our value? Because when you're out pitching brands and when brands are reacting to pricing, that's the only way you're really going to know if that is your price. Yeah. You're really worth how much someone says yes to. Yeah. Right. And that's kind of whether you're a freelancer or you're a creator or whatever, like whatever you accept and what they accept is your worth. Yeah. Right. And there are, there are other math equations. CPMs, right. Is a math equation, which is cost per thousand views.

20:14That's how YouTube pays you on YouTube AdSense. There is CPA, which is cost per acquisition, which we never really did any of those deals, which means like we do an ad. If X amount of people sign up for your service, then you pay us X amount. We never did those deals. We just said, hey, this is our flat rate. And another thing we did is say, we sell these in packages of three. And essentially why we did that was we said, you know, if you're buying across three episodes, then the aggregate performance of that is what you're buying. So it's not just a one-off because there's so many factors when it comes to YouTube, right?

20:52There's so many different factors. There's, you know, the algorithm, there's just other world events, there's all kinds of things. So buying across three, we felt like was the right entry point for brands to get in and actually see if they were a good fit with us. Yeah. And that's also thinking with the brand in mind, because if a brand comes in and they buy one video, again, you don't know what's going to happen. Yeah. You may hit it out of the park with that video. You may not. Yeah. If they buy three, there's a better chance that maybe one of those videos will hit in a way that completely outperforms the other two.

21:24And then the brand is in a great position. Yeah. And now as a creator, you've also given that brand a great experience. Whereas if they were to buy one and it didn't go that well from a viewership perspective, they may never buy with you again. So that brings up a really important point of like brand deal philosophy as creators. As a creator, you, as you're getting involved with the brand, you need to authentically care about the outcome of the integration. That's a very important thing. You know, you do need to care about what happens. Like, is this the right call to action? Is this the right, you know, messaging?

22:02Can we work together to make something more creative? Like being invested in that process is really important. That's what would get you into the, you know, when we just talked about like creators who are making, you know, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars on a brand deal, that's what gets you there is being the person who takes pride in the brand integration, who understands and empathizes with what the outcome is that the brand is trying to get to. And if that's actually a right fit for you. So if you're, if you are that type of creator who can like step into that, that's, that's where there's a lot of room to grow because this, like the brand deals are a product that you're selling, you know, and you have to deeply care about that product.

22:40And you're doing work for another company. Yeah. It may be on your platform. But you're spending hours of your life to work for someone else's company during that time. So it does matter that you care somewhat about that company. Now, in the early innings of being a creator, brands will come out of the woodwork that you've never heard of. It's definitely your job to understand the brand, decide if it's right for your audience, if you care about it. But there are creators who do brand deals early because the brand came, like you said, like inbound, not because there was like some dying passion to work for that brand, but it represents an opportunity for creators, smaller creators to turn this passion into a career.

23:21And I think as you grow as a creator, you have more leverage and you have more of an opportunity to decide which brands you want to work with that you truly are passionate about, that you believe in, that you're interested in spending your time working for. You really only get afforded that opportunity as things get a little bit more stable. You know, that's my perspective, especially it. And that's one of the reasons to not, you know, bet the house on your YouTube channel, which is what we did. You know, like we, we were left without many options. We were like, here we go. We're all in on this YouTube channel and needs to provide for us.

23:57And that gets you in a position where it's very hard to say no to brand deals. And I'm going to quote Victoria Paris, right. From our show. She said, you are what you say no to. I thought it was like such a fantastic quote. And she was talking about brand partnerships. She's like, your brand is defined by what you say no to. And you want to be in a position where if someone offers you something, but it's not a good fit, you can say no. Because the whole thing, this whole career is predicated on trust. Where it's like, do you, the audience, you know, trust that this show is going to provide the value that we promise?