my latest video got 400,000 views how much money can you get for me on another video that would get 400,000 views it depends since 2017 I've earned over $1.2 million from sponsorships on this YouTube channel this video is a long form conversation with the man who deserves probably the biggest share of the credit for that my agent and also the CEO in the company that I co-own nebula Dave whisk Dave and his team have booked over 100 m million dollars in sponsorships for over 200 creators over the last 10 years that includes me as well as a lot of my friends like legal eagle tiar zooo Mary spender philosophy tube and a whole lot more so my goal with this conversation is to create a

hopefully comprehensive guide for both getting sponsors interested in your channel if you're a Creator and also for negotiating better deals with rates that you deserve specifically we're going to talk about how to know when your channel is ready for sponsors how to attract Brands how to price your early spots when you're not really sure what your content is worth and how to negotiate higher rates over time so you're actually getting paid what you deserve over the Long Haul at what point can I work with Brands if you look at views from subscribers and it's 5% you don't have an audience yet we'll also talk about whether or not you should sign with an agency and what to consider what

to ask them if one reaches out to you now those are just the broad Strokes as you can see this is a pretty lengthy conversation there are a lot of other insights and topics that we cover and I wanted to talk with Dave specifically about this because as far as I know nebula Talent is the only Creator agency out there that actively pushes hard for data from sponsors to actually tell creators how well they're performing and help them negotiate rates that are fair over time before I started working with Dave and with nebula Talent when I got my first few brand deals way back in 2017 all I knew was what the agency representing the brand was offering me I had no idea what their cut

was I had no idea how well my spots performed for the brand over time which meant I had no idea if I was getting paid fairly additionally those agencies didn't actively represent me which meant they had no obligation to bring me deals and I had no idea when my next brand deal would come once I started working with nebula talent in late 2017 that all changed Not only was every single video that I wanted sponsored actually sponsored but I got performance data which meant I was able to see which videos were performing well which videos could be improved and whether or not I was getting paid fairly which meant that my rates started rising over time pretty quickly for example because I'm pretty

transparent with my sponsorship pric when I started working with skillshare back in 2017 I was getting $2,000 per video now I get $115,000 per video and in this conversation you're going to learn how that pricing actually works because spoilers it is not based on views it is not based on subscribers and it's not based on a lot of the metrics a lot of other people and gurus on Twitter and here on YouTube will say you need to pay attention to it's all about value and you're going to understand what constitutes that value in this conversation one more thing worth noting is that our actual product the nebula streaming service over at nebula.com which means that as the CEO

of nebula Dave has the rare distinction of having deep experience both as a talent agent representing creators negotiating with dozens of different brands over the years but also as a CEO of a company that sponsors creators he has deep understanding of the metrics that these companies actually look at and care about so you're going to be able to benefit from the insights that come from both of those experiences so without further Ado here's my conversation with Dave wiscus all right I'm going to jump right into it my latest video got 400,000 views over on the Thomas Frank explains Channel how much money can you get for me to put a sponsor on another video that would get 400,000

views it depends okay on what uh million things uh it's your channel okay so we know something about you we know something about your audience we know something about how people respond to you uh this is on wait which channel the Thomas Frank explains Channel okay the second Channel big old notion Channel slightly different audience in the main channel so we know nothing other than these are people who like you probably we don't know how many of those viewers are return viewers right now in this conversation we don't know how many of those views are from subscribers we don't know on average how many views come from subscribers we don't know what monthly views look like

we don't have any past sponsor data to work from so the answer is how much do you want well I'll go ask for that can I have $400,000 I'll ask okay I'll I'll go to the sponsor Factory and I'll say can Tom have $400,000 this what a dollar per view that's I'll take a dollar per view that's ambitious I don't think that's ever been done the truth is that we know a little bit about your audience we have some sense of things you're a handsome bearded white guy giving life and productivity advice the audience responds to that in a different way than they would to a voiceover Channel if you're if you made the same video same script but you weren't on camera that would play differently the audience

wouldn't attach to you in the same way a lot of what your sponsor rate comes down to is how attached is the audience to you in your case fairly attached uh we've seen from mutual friends and from folks out in the world people who I know who uh when they realize that we work together they'll they'll talk about oh I watch all of his no videos we know that there's like an association there for you but that's context that I have because I know you if you were just to come to me and say I have a video that's likely to get 400,000 views how much money the answer is like I so views do not correlate to Dollars directly there can be a correlation but it's not a direct correlation and if there is a

correlation on a channel which there often will be like the way one channel performs relative to its views on you know on a normalized scale it will look as if there is some correlation between the dollar amount or some causal relationship between the dollar amount and the view count uh that's misleading most likely what's happening is you've just got normalized views over like your sponsor performance was here and your views happened to be here and then later both of those numbers went up that doesn't mean that one caused the other it just meant that they both happened to go up at the same rate at the same pace so basically for a given set of other factors audience affinity and connection

to the Creator the product being promoted the topic the format views can correlate with sponsor rate some sponsors are going to work better for a viral view video and other sponsors are going to lean heavily for parasocial if we if we think in terms of you something like a skillshare you are there in your videos primarily telling people not how to do things but you're a little bit like there's productivity advice there's context there's I wouldn't call it how to but there's a lot of like how to think about how to because people are coming to you as a an either subject matter expert or um like sort of a spiritual guide for productivity uh it's really easy to assume that audience

is an audience who wants to better themselves in some way and that is an audience that lines up pretty well with skillshare uh at the end if you segue into and another great way to learn about camp placement or lighting or whatever is to watch this great class I found on skillshare blah then the audience who sat through that even if it's their first video of yours they've seen they're kind of primed up right and they might be much more willing to follow that thread one step further and click through uh so a viral audience might play for you if that video really blows up if it catches fire well look at why it caught fire that video might have gotten big because it

did a really good job of capturing uh an answer to the question that the person was asking when they found it and then if that spreads and the algorithm robot puppy puts it in front of more people who have similar questions and even not knowing you they feel satisfied with how their questions were answered in the end it's going to spread out it's going to spread out and the end messaging segue the virality of that video can be a plus for you and for the sponsor right but if you're pushing something like nebula if the call to action and the primary selling point of the sponsor nebula is come sign up for more of me Early Access to me leaning more into the

parasocial then a viral audience isn't really going to Care they don't know you enough to care about you they don't know that they should care about you or even something like let's say brilliant maybe the video the topic of the video doesn't line up so perfectly still a great sponsor in general but maybe it doesn't line up perfectly with going and learning about stem because you're talking about cameras and making videos as a side hustle and then you're like well and you can learn about physics that's not really what I was here for so some section of your audience might be really into that but the largest chunk of your audience the audience for that

particular video may not be I guess before we get into everything else I do want to draw a parallel there because when I made the video for my paid notion template ultimate brain when it hit a 100,000 views we estimated that it had driven 65k in sales wow getting close to that dollar per viiew Mark but the way I look at it is very similar to what you just said about uh if we you know are talking about something that the audience is already very primed for they could they could come into one video have never seen me before and still convert for a sponsor because they are already interested in the thing that the sponsor represents and I see that reflected in

the template video too because anybody who's clicking on that video sees you know in notion in the title they're already primed to want to use notion and ideally to want to improve how they use notion so even if they don't know who I am they're like well I'm already primed for this tool so I'm primed to convert here yeah that's an audience where you got to think about what is The Logical Next Step you have to imagine when the audience sees this sponsor read or when they get to the end of this video what is their logical next up what do they want to do next right at the end of a video about uh making videos as a side hustle what is The Logical next step for the person who finished that video

mhm well a pretty strong case for logical next step is learn more about making videos you're obviously interested in the topic go learn more you watch a video about notion and how to do amazing things in your life with notion templates you get to the end of that video The Logical Next Step might be to get some uh notion templates from the expert who just made the video that you watched that is how you get a bigger chunk of the people who finish the thing uh to click on the sponsor link and make a purchase increasing the conversion count if the logical next step is go learn more about notion but what you present them with is let's learn about physics or subscription coffee

yeah uh then it's like some subset of those people will be interested in subscription coffee because they just were or maybe you mention coffee somewhere in the video or maybe you have a really great segue like yeah if you're making as a side hustle you still have your day job right and it takes a lot of time to put these things together and you might have some long nights I always did and that's why I drink whatever coffee and you should buy some like that's kind of a way to fake a logical Next Step the smooth segue thing is about creating a logical Next Step sometimes it works really well sometimes it doesn't but the uh the name of the game is often just like making sure that

the thing that you're promoting has some actual relevance to the audience something I would like to touch on a bit later is how you do that in a way that doesn't compromise the Integrity of the content uh because that was something that I was always worried about back when I first started working you in like 2017 uh I was worried like if I put brilliant on a video on how to do better in math it's going to compromise the Integrity of the video because the sponsor is too close to the video right and I'm sort of cooled on that but I think a lot of people also are going to have the same question uh ideally the kind of people that I would want watching this video who have their

audience in mind first yeah uh when you think Integrity a lot of it comes down to the Integrity of the Creator and so much of what a sponsorship is uh just trust you're not selling airtime on your video right there's a cheaper way to get airtime on your video It's called AdSense if somebody just wanted airtime they would do that what the sponsor is buying is trust they are buying access to the trust relationship that you have with your audience so when you at the end of the video say I really like this brand of subscription C coffee it wakes me up in the morning I feel great and I have lots of Genius brain ideas uh they believe that is true and that you mean what you say and over time if

you're promoting ways for them to improve their mental acuity if you're promoting tools that they can use to improve their lives if you're promoting services that help them enhance their skills and develop professionally you build a rhythm of trust with your audience that you are only here to promote things that bring them benefit so when you get to sponsor number 60 sponsor number 70 uh there's a couple of ways that can go right one is you promote uh a service that uh dubiously purchases maybe a plot of land in a foreign country to get you a fake title that nobody will ever care about that sounds on the face of it like either a dumb novelty that is harmless

or a scam even if it's just a dumb novelty do you want to be the dumb novelty guy or do you want to be quality products and services guy yep like you've built up this trust and now you've just done something that can erode it a little bit the other side if you get to sponsor number 60 70 whatever it is and you make a video about making videos and at the end you're promoting the new Canon C something or other because Canon saw your previous video about making videos they decided to sponsor you then the audience isn't thinking this guy is a sellout shill who's just going to take money and put whatever random [__] he wants to in front of me they're

thinking this is high quality sponsor that benefits me guy and if he did a deal with Canon this must be pretty cool yeah you need to be seen as being selective about that buys you out of the ethical question of why is this kind of sponsor sponsoring this video the other side of that though was like if you are a Creator who only makes videos about Canon or about cameras and about reviewing cameras and then you do a Canon sponsorship your credibility for everything else is shot yeah so the difference would be like here's a channel where I review cameras and then I take a sponsorship it sort of erodes my non-biased opinion whereas if it's just like I'm going to teach you

lighting setups I'm going to teach you sound like I'm going to teach you the craft of film making and I take a sponsorship from Canon it's different because it doesn't uh erode the Integrity of editorially what I'm doing yeah because at no point will somebody need to worry if they're coming to you for a question of which camera should I get and sometimes you are saying Sony when they're paying and sometimes you're saying Canon when they're paying it's like well which one actually is better will he lie to me for money right that's weird if you've always said or if you've made videos in the past talking about your camera setup and then you get to

this video the one time you're promoting an actual camera and you say here's my setup this is what I've alwaysed use this video is sponsored by Canon uh they want me to talk about this great new camera it's got these features it does these things uh and this is what I've always used myself that sincerity matters right because that's really is what you use and that's going to carry through to the audience but it's going to be a combination of time and relationship maturity and how much trust there is between you and the audience and you got to be really careful not to sacrifice that for a paycheck so what I want this to be is ideally like the One-Stop shop guide for the Creator who

either wants to work with Brands eventually or is starting to get approached by Brands maybe even works you I'm going to put a lot of expectations on your plate and obviously it can't be you can't be all of that um but I want I want to at least cover a lot of the questions that creators are going to have well I think the I'll just call it out there's going to be a lot of it depends and I should disclaim UPF front that I work with uh a collection of creators who work within a collection of genres and there's plenty of genres out there like uh beauty or vloggers or comedy channels there's a bunch of genres that I've never touched and they might have their own rules in their

universe and I acknowledge that nothing that I'm going to say here is necessarily a universal truth so as long as we're okay with that I'm happy to answer any yes and I will put my favorite quote in the universe out there UPF front Bruce Lee once said adapt what's useful reject what's useless adapt what is specifically your own uh use that as your North Star for anything you hear here because yeah like you've worked with going on 100 80 190 creators uh total I've ever worked with probably over 200 at that point yeah so over 200 creators um 10 years of booking sponsorships for creators you've worked as a Creator yourself in multiple genres and now being CEO of nebula uh

we're one of the biggest sponsors on YouTube at this point would you say like 500k spend per month yeah uh and Sky's limit on that because of how quickly the revenue returns so it's like everything is built by numbers everything is built on data so like get more data spend more money it's uh yeah it's weird to have seen so many different facets of it I've sat in so many of the different chairs um and not just as a content creator for video but across medium a podcast or professional musician so kind of getting a sense of how different uh sharks and different Waters operate um I've I've I've certainly become skeptical yes and I've uh firsthand seen a lot of these

sharks um have worked with some of the Sharks uh and then met you in 2017 so you know just to cover the bonafides here I think like since meeting you in 2017 um I've made 1.2 million in sponsorships you're welcome that's all yeah I mean it is through you and standard so thank you well mean we're we're uh that's money you earned I do yeah I do understand that I did earn it the sponsors wanted to work with me but like uh you and standard and all the team you know behind standard are in part responsible for that and in part I think responsible for uh helping me to navigate the path and make it sustainable over a course of five years um until I you know at least temporarily

stopped working with Brands last year temporarily you say yeah I mean this is going on the main Channel it might be sponsored by something we'll see so anyway you've been working with me for 6 years now we have 180 creators currently being represented um something like that think you're the person that I would want to talk to if I was building a resource for creators coming up wanting to know how to navigate these Waters it would be so weird if you didn't want to talk to me after everything you just said if you're like you're third on my list i' be like oh [__] okay so I sort of divided my mental outline into chapters of the Creator's journey and the first one is obviously like I want

to work with Brands yeah at what point can I work with Brands like how big do I need to be on YouTube or whatever it is yeah this is one of those early days questions um it depends okay there's no single answer to this generally speaking if somebody recommends a channel to me and I take a look at it and I see six months of posting history and they're getting 20,000 views per video my reaction is internally is they're not there yet if I see 50,000 it's maybe if I see 100,000 like okay we're about there but even then the view counts views don't really matter the view counts aren't super representative they're just like a you

got answer this question like there's this collection of creators like how many have this okay that shrinks the pool okay how many have this shrinks the pool the shrinks the pool so those concentric circles the first filter is average views per video a couple things you can get out of that if I see that you've got 10,000 views and then 100,000 views and then 2,000 views and then 500 views and then a million views you're not a million view Channel you're a 500 view Channel and some other stuff happened along the way so you're saying the lowest view count of a recent videos is representative of what you think they're likely to get future ones I would say

if I see a wide range I'm going to be wondering why okay and if I see that you've got one or two videos with a couple hundred views and then one or two videos with a couple million views but you've got a couple hundred subscribers that leads me to believe maybe uh the million plus view videos were either a fluke or you're just starting to break out which matters they could be perfectly this could be your new normal but if it's your brand new you might still not quite be ready for sponsorships yet there's a difference between the audience and your audience the audience belongs to YouTube and you can already buy access to that through AdSense your audience is the

relationships the trust relationships that you have fostered you have grown over time people who will listen to what you say and take your advice on things who the people who will stick through to the end of the sponsor read and are more likely to buy something or to sign up for something yeah in part because they trust you and in part because they want to support you that desire to be a part of your story paraso uh involved in your success let's not discount that is your audience the audience the you know a couple million views that's the audience that's YouTube's audience how many of those are yours well if you've got six videos only the two most recent have a million plus

and you've only got 500 subscribers then I'm going to guess probably about 500 of those people are actually your audience right so it's not a question of what is it worth how much is a sponsorship for a couple million views the answer the question is how much is a sponsorship for a couple hundred views and the these things if we don't know much more than just those numbers we have to go by the numbers but if you dig in and you see um that on these latest two videos that have over a million views a lot of them are return viewers or uh watch time is really high that might tilt things or it might indicate that good things are happing but there's I don't know there's so many data points

behind the scenes that you would need to look at to really understand it um but that first filter that first litness test is do I see a consistency and a trajectory okay so consistency trajectory going upward building that core audience that comes back for you has trust in your channel if we're looking at the back end and we're on YouTube so we're going to use YouTube as the example here what are the metrics that a Creator should be tracking and looking at most closely to determine you know this is starting to pick up steam I'm starting to become attractive to Brands whether as uh you know me reaching out to them or you know looking forward to the time when they might be

com be coming to me views from subscribers okay uh take a look at the channel views from subscribers over the last 30 days and this may even answer an upcoming question like when am I ready right if you look at views from subscribers let's say you're getting half a million views per video and then you go into views uh percentage of views from subscribers over the last 30 days not percentage of watchtime percentage of views from subscribers over the last 30 days and it's 5% you don't have an audience yet okay you're building one you're in build mode and that's awesome to an extent you'll always be in build mode get used to that live there but if you don't if you've not built your

audience yet 5% or can we say more precisely that is your audience like if it's 5% views from subscribers maybe you do have an audience like maybe you had two million views in a 30-day period like 5% is a decent number there yeah you're going to you want to look at uh percentage of views from subscribers you want to look at how many views came from the subscriber tab MH uh and you want to take a look at how many return visitors you have the that'll give you a sort

of General sense of how many people are coming in for you okay uh versus if it's all from browse features or from search God it's all from search you got nothing uh really yeah well I mean I might want to debate on that one it well anything can vary by genre okay and productivity might be different or how-to content might be different uh but generally if somebody goes into search they're looking for an answer to something they get to you if you've got tons of search traffic but no return visitors what's your audience you might have uh something magical uh a really great answer to the question about logical Next Step that a certain kind of sponsor would be really grateful to be a

part of but you don't have your audience okay if nobody watches more than one of your videos that is not your audience you can still capitalize like I say you if you have uh how-to uh guides on woodworking or something um uh do-it-yourself homeowner repair type stuff people come in for that they get their question answered if the logical next step is go to Home Depot and you have an ad for Home Depot at the end that might be really effective uh but it doesn't necessarily mean that person is going to buy a Thomas Frank fix it t-shirt right so it seems like you're almost building a distinction between when a channel is ready for very specific kind of

sponsors which I think is and correct me if I'm wrong but is a much harder question to answer generally well even if you're doing the Home Depot ad you still need views right and if you're getting a couple hundred views per video like why would Home Depot want to sponsor you ever yeah and that one makes sense like if it's 200 views a video you're probably not going to get hardly anything yeah and that's why the trick with any of this like it's such a complicated flowchart and like what I'm talking about here is handwavy and specific to certain genres and I don't I don't want to mislead anybody into thinking that there's a single clear answer there just there isn't one um

there can be for certain genres kind of but then there's like are you on camera are you not on camera do you have high camera production value or does it look like it was shot on an iPhone and poorly edited all of these things will influence sometimes in surprising directions you would assume that this is the better in every category but sometimes shooting something on your iPhone makes it feel more relatable right or like we saw um like Linds Ellis used to do very ironic ad reads right and then they would do quite well sometimes yeah like she was the one she did where there was like a big rant in there or an entire video I think about Squarespace I think there was yeah and

then uh it ends with and then go sign up for Squarespace which uh did really well and the audience loved it so great everyone wins yeah so to come back to the point there's like I guess there might be a distinction we can make between uh a channel that is ready for let's say let's call it a general slate of sponsors like back in my channels Heyday if you want to call it that it was a sponsor in every video and we had a decent rotation and they were all sort of something different versus now um I feel like Thomas ring explains might have broken past this at this point but say six months ago anything that wasn't notion or a notion tool probably wouldn't perform that well

right because it's like we did have uh a huge percentage of our views from search before yes uh now it's mostly browse but it was like I think it was the top thing was search for a while probably because people are looking for answers to specific questions they come in they discover you that as a discovery mechanism is fine the question is not how did the viewers get to you today it's how many of those people are getting to you for the second time the third time the fifth time and I don't know if can see that level of granularity but there's certainly what was the content of those videos I mean it's all how to everything's how to right uh how to what how to build

a habit tracker how to open links with a different URL Handler like from very broad to very technically Niche and then the end of that video who's the sponsor me always me right yeah there's there's never been a sponsor here's how to do these things here's how here I am an expert here are the systems you need to solve problem MH you have problem you will find this video people search they find this video because they have that problem they watch because they have that problem and in the end logical Next Step here's a tool you can use that helps you solve this problem of course that's going to do well they're already there for notion or habit trackers or

whatever they here's here's a handsome bearded white dude uh who seems like he knows what he's talking about he's confident and he says these things and he's got a really wellth thought out system I want to be like that guy I want to be that uh put together I want to be that thoughtful about how I comport myself go through life build my systems then at the end you're saying and here's a tool I'm going to sell you on how to build a system like hell yeah I'm signing up for that so that makes sense logical Next Step so there's a useful insight there people find me because they're searching for I want to be able to have a track or a notion they don't care that it's me

they don't know who I am half the time right and then basically you're saying they're watching the video initially to get that answer but then you know by virtue of the way I look the way I speak the way my set looks how professional everything looks there starts to I start to build a connection there you win their trust quickly this is sales right like you go into a car dealership and the guy who's got the uh schlubby ill-fitting suit and the bad combover is probably not going to be as compelling a figure to you as like a really cool handsome guy like a James Bond Vibes this guy knows what's what and he's probably going to all the cool clubs and whatever uh you're going to

kind of favor his opinion on which car is right for you right this guy over here it's like I don't know I read the car buying guide and I went on the internet and it said I should get this Honda Accord so I'd like the Honda Accord please whereas this guy might talk you into a sports car because he's that makes sense actually my wife recently went to a tailor to get a suit jacket she bought tailored and she came back and she was just gushing about the person who helped her and she's like I just want to be this guy's best friend so very good example I feel like um he probably could have sold her a skillshare membership pretty easily maybe he should have maybe he should

have okay so coming back to the sort of view thresholds that you were saying like 20K average is probably not going to do it 50k maybe this is super generalized heris and it seems like it is primarily for your benefit as an agent that has very limited time and resources in terms of like your ability to go out and find brand deals for 180 creators there's Instinct I think that comes with experience okay where I can look at a channel I can see high quality thumbnails uh view count is trending up uh might be early days but they're clearly putting in the work and the audience is definitely starting to catch on um but average 50,000 views okay that's interesting if I go in and

the channel is five years old and they've been putting out a video every week and the thumbnails look like [__] bad typography bad composition uh they just keep cranking stuff out huge fluctuations in view counts but the average 50k me gotcha because one of these people is on a trajectory one of these people is putting in the work the other one thinks that they' found success because the number is just big enough to make them think that right but they're not doing anything to build it they're in like maintenance mode on their view count that makes and so like uh they're probably cycling through audience or they have exactly Their audience but they're not attracting anybody else in

MH so they're not going to be from a sponsor perspective you want like you want to Turning reservoir of core audience because like on any given video there's a reservoir of people who could potentially sign up for the sponsor they could con uh potentially be convinced to sign up for that service and then of that there's a smaller group of people who will sign up for the service but you go all the way out it's like the people who watch the video the people who watch it to the end the people who actually watch the sponsor read the people who think the sponsor read is interesting the people who click the people who buy or you know some version of that what you

want is for with every video you are pouring more potential in at every stage of that even down to the people who watch all the way to the end it should be to some degree a different group of people and you can have a situation where 200,000 people watch every video you make but you get uh a thousand conversions for a sponsor every single time MH you would think conventional wisdom would be if it's 200,000 people and you're getting a thousand conversions you got 2,000 of those right at best you can do that uh two uh 200 times you could do that yeah you can do that 200 times and you've run out of people right uh or more likely you're going to hit a point of diminishing

returns along the way mhm this time it's a thousand next time it's 950 and then it's like 920 and then that doesn't happen what is YouTube if not a machine that goes out and finds you more audience right this is what the algorithm does what doesn't find you an audience that finds your video for the viewers who would like it but from a practical perspective Ive how many new subscribers do you gain when you post a new video you would expect that the number of new subscribers gained on a 200,000 view video that could be any number it could be a few hundred it could be a few thousand depending on the channel so a couple of things are happening there one is that the pool is constantly

being replenished it's not the same 200,000 people watching every video yeah that's absurd it's a different group of 200,000 people every time right and there's going to be some people who watch every one and there's going to be a larger group of people who watch every other video y or an even larger group who have missed the last five but then the algorithm put this in their recommended feed and the thumbnail looked good and they recognized it was you so they clicked of that most of your subscribers don't watch every video and most of your views don't come from subscribers so what is your audience is sort of a rotating cast of people who have seen some of your stuff right you

are not Game of Thrones you are not destination viewing for a large number of people and it's better off for everybody if you don't fool yourself into thinking that every one of your subscribers is sitting down the moment you post a video with a bag of popcorn and clearing their schedule to watch whatever you just posted right it's YouTube videos are a crime of opportunity in a lot of ways so some things are destination viewing I'll stop what I'm doing for a Patrick Williams video I'll stop what I'm doing for I don't know an ALT shift x video speaking of Game of Thrones but there's plenty of other creators who I love their stuff but I might miss a video or two and then

maybe later I'll go back and I'll do a little binge and these things are all valid these things are all perfectly good ways for audience to uh discover the things you make but very few people are like so in love with you that they're going to sit down the second you post and watch it nobody is uh I say nobody but largely the audience is not full of complete s who have to go through all of that so if the cast is rotating the cast of the audience is rotating if the waters are constantly churning then you don't have 200,000 people and that's the limit of that 200,000 some of them are never going to hear of you again M some of those people have no idea who you were they just

watched a thing and they moved on with their lives because who cares this wasn't for them or it wasn't such an important and compelling thing that they feel they need another one right for whatever reason there are other groups there some some subset of that is people who are seeing you for the first time and will want to see the next one but they're not in the group that's ready to buy on the next video or the next video they might be MH so we can Define the audience not and I think this is important not as your subscriber count super not that uh I would say out of my 3 million subscribers in this channel probably 2 million of them have been gone like you know they graduated

college they don't want the college tips anymore they don't care about productivity anymore um so you know there's a pool of people that are just kind of out of my life how many times have we been together and you've been recognized and somebody says I watched your videos all the time in college I mean literally two nights ago at the restaurant the waiter was like yeah I watched your videos in my freshman year I really liked them and I'm graduating now so I don't need them anymore right not a bad thing he sort of graduated out of the audience and then it's up to you do you want to keep appealing to this demographic or do you want to broaden it out and those are

decisions that you'll make as a Creator but his feedback wasn't negative it wasn't I liked you and then he started to suck so I'm out it was this served the thing that this served the purpose that I needed it to serve and I'm grateful to you for that even if you're not currently a part of my viewing habits so I think this is important like we should Define like your audience is this very nebulous group of people who are familiar with you and who are to some degree willing to watch your content that's coming out now right so you know between the people who watch every video religiously the ones who watch here and there the ones who just like see a video pop up and they

recommended every six months that's your audience I would say I would distill it to your audience is the group of people who watch your videos on purpose we can handwave it at that there's going to be asterisks and footnotes all over the place but roughly speaking people who watch your videos because they meant to that is your audience and so on YouTube you're saying the way to get a rough picture of that is to go into your analytics and look at views from like returning viewers yeah look at returning viewers look at views from subscribers anything that is a metric that hints this person watched me on purpose okay not found this video and watched this video on purpose but watched my video on

purpose people who came back are a pretty good example of that gotcha at least as a Point subscribers obviously there are people who watching on purpose but trouble with subscriber count now or views from subscribers now is that uh the like recommended feed is front and center even me a hardcore sub feed user I don't use it anymore I looked at my views like from the sub feed on Thomas Frank explains and it was. 2% that sounds about right and if I went to my entire Channel's history not the last 28 days I think it was one % so wow so I think views from the sub feed doesn't really say much anymore but the number of returning views you get I

think that's much more compelling yeah and uh all of this is a little bit mystical right we're we're trying to read tea leaves yep and so like no one data point is the thing no one item in analytics is the thing views from subscribers is pretty good right uh return viewers pretty good return viewers is pretty good for establishing like how much audience do you have uh percentage of views from Subs over the last 30 days tends to be a pretty good metric for figuring out like whether you're ready for sponsorships or not anything under about 20% maybe not okay uh 20% to 50% is The Sweet Spot mm the closer you get to 50 the better your sponsor rate is probably going to be um

once you hit 50 and above it's hard to go over 50 because if you're at about 50 if half of your views are coming from people who were subscribed that's a lot of subscribers giving positive signals to the algorithm so it will reward those signals by going out and finding more people I see so that 50% number keeps growing keeps growing so the algorithm fills up the other 50% if you've got this growing but the algorithm brings you nothing it means that only subscribers like this video and nobody else cares and that's a problem right so 20 to 50 % is about the target range uh over 50 55 maybe percent and you start to have troubles if like 100% of your views are subscri uh

subscribers it means that the algorithm was showing your videos to people and nobody cared gotcha so on to pricing oh boy the even harder topic um this is the most common question I get yeah how much can you get me yep how much can you get me for a video so I want to dig into the question of how much do you charge when you're just getting into this uh but I first want to jump forward and sort of like set the stage when I was doing sponsors regularly I had to sponsor in every video which was between two and four videos a month every sponsor rate was $10 to 122,000 like extremely consistent that's pretty good and I mean and you booked these how what were the view

counts like right around 50k on my channel know we're like 150 to 300K okay probably I'm remembering I think when we first started working together your view counts were lower yes they were a little low I think I was probably breaking a 100 or getting close to it when we first started working together and we first started working together um this will be a question to come back to but the first sponsor rate you booked me was actually lower than when I had first worked with that brand directly and there's a reason for that but I want to First establish like why was my sponsor rate so consistent for years like $10,000 $10,000 $10,000 every video even though the view counts would

fluctuate like crazy and I imagine the conversions would fluctuate like crazy too well the view counts uh who cares like there's there's an audience your audience who will watch your videos the people who watch on purpose that's probably not fluctuating very much the collection of viral views that the algorithm will bring you that so here's here's here's your audience and here's the audience and the audience will fluctuate wildly your audience is probably going to be fairly steady MH to within a margin of error uh we see this all the time where a Creator will panic because they think well this probably bombed for the sponsor because the video way underperformed then we'll look at

the data and we're like no actually did a little better than usual and it's like wait how is that possible like well let's go into the analytics okay well your views from subscribers was higher than usual so while it didn't catch algorithmic fire uh your audience really liked it like your audience clicked through your audience saw the thumbnail and watched the thing others didn't so you're not really growing your audience on this video very much but like your audience did see it and they click through and they signed up at roughly the same rate I'm always amused and fascinated at the consistency from video to video you would think that the number of people want to sign up for

nebula or whatever uh from this video to this video would be a wildly different number of people right it isn't it's super consistent I've also been really fascinated with that on the sales side like sales of our products are usually pretty even from day to day MH and I'm just like how is it the same number of people decide they want to buy a template today as they did yesterday y like I don't get it but it just somehow works out that way and web traffic seems to work the same it's like you look at your analytics and maybe sometimes you get a viral Spike or you have seasonality but dayto day it's usually like within a fairly tight range yeah like we look at nebula signups just

like just the analytics for nebula signups and I know that a wind over video I can expect roughly this many signups per day um with you know it's day one this and day two day three day four uh and then uh maybe a cinema winds video goes out and a Neo video or a uh Lindsay Ellis video was released and like I kind of know per Creator what those chunks look like and so I can at the like a one Monon span of signups and I can see with remarkable consistency like oh here's where more creators posted videos and then here's where people were like just as a collective everybody was working on their scripts or like trying to get something out the door and then suddenly

at the end of the month it spikes back up again because everybody finally rushed their video out because they knew that they had a deadline uh you can see the EB and the flow of it and it's not because like oh like on these days these people perform particularly well it's like no just you put the money into the machine sponsoring the thing um and this is the perspective as a sponsor you put the money into the machine and you know roughly how the creators are going to perform so seeing the spikes and the dips really come down to how many sponsorships ran that day right not did this Creator nail it or did this Creator underperform CU there will be variances sometimes there's a dud and

sometimes you just knock it way out of the park uh but those tend to balance each other out and so from a sponsor's perspective it's about normalizing the data as much as you can think about like a portfolio you're not booking one video from one Creator you're booking a collection of creators you're booking a tranch of videos from a collection of creators and you're doing that uh repeatedly because you want to we're playing baseball here right we want as many at bats as possible we want to play as many games as possible and over that you can see where the trends are you can predict better and you can get a better understanding of what a given player's performance is and you can optimize for

that you can build that you can try to find the markers that would help you identify who another great player might be but it's not about I'm a sponsor I give you the money you go out it's a dud therefore never work with you again it might affect how much I pay you for the next one and C certainly will um but at the beginning of the relationship it certainly will uh but it doesn't mean I'm blacklisting you okay it doesn't mean this guy sucks we never want to go there again unless the answer is just zero or um comically lower than what you would expect for margin of error and this is another point of confusion I think where creators will go in asking for astronomically

High rates to your question like why was it so consistent but also like the like 10 what was it 10 to it's like10 to 122,000 was almost always the rate so 10 to 12K uh but the first one we did lower yeah I mean when we started working together I think the first spot we ever did was 2K that's not and then it went 4K 7K 10K like up pretty quickly not uncommon uh and for a handful of reasons but uh one I'll address here in this moment is that if you go in at 2K and overperform the sky is the limit for you in how much that sponsor is going to love and trust and be excited to work with you again that doesn't mean you should intentionally discount um like we made a best guess based on data and

there's other stuff uh but generally speaking uh what you want to do is make sure you're not going in too high right don't go in too low but if you have to choose between too high and too low pick too low because low is going to Dazzle and create a great first impression that makes them want to work with you again yeah you're building a relationship and I mean this is if you're doing it right this person is somebody you'll work with again and again because you want them to keep giving you money right do you want $10,000 once or do you want $8,000 a month forever mhm right like this is the balance you could probably go in and convince somebody to give you 20 grand even if

you're only worth three but if you know you're worth three and you say 20 and they pay you 20 you didn't get a good deal you sold your own future right at a discount don't do that so it's more about don't don't go in with too high a rate that you're you're ensuring that they don't want to come back and work with you're building a relationship you want to make the marketing person look good in front of their boss you should be the easiest decision they ever made next month and the month after that because they know that whatever their target is whatever their kpis are uh key performance indicators typically cost per acquisition how much they pay to acquire a new customer let's say it's

$25 they want to spend $25 to acquire a new customer there's going to be some influencer out there who has a giant ego and uh a Hardball team and they convince the brand it's got to be some crazy number and they say worth testing and they pay that money performs at $300 per conversion sponsors like all right not doing that again right uh and then they just don't make the call they don't call up and say well you did you way underperformed let's do one cheaper because they probably know that the response to that is going to be no yeah uh like why waste the time why waste the energy and the Creator is probably not calling up and saying how well did that one do and if

they do the answer they're going to get is it underperformed and to them that means oh I'd have to take less money never mind I'll just go talk to somebody else and quote my astronomically High rate again and for some creators they can do that they can move from bridge to bridge lighting fires and they think that's success they think that because they got 10 people to pay them $20,000 for a $3,000 video that they are now sitting on a mountain of evidence that they're worth $20,000 they're not when in reality they're just sort of tricking brand after brand into thinking that this is going to be worth it right so no value is really delivered right and what's going

to happen in the end is when they complete that cycle and they're looking for another sponsor suddenly they're not going to have one right or you can keep finding new sponsors I guess or doing Outreach to other types of Brands and making something happen or maybe after a year of sitting there that first video finally had caught up to per performance and maybe it's worth testing again maybe from the sponsor perspective like it's within test range so we'll try and maybe the audience has grown they do it again same results like oh burn that bridge and so uh it's really easy to mistake a view count for audience size and then let that trick you into thinking that

you're worth more than you are or people paying you that much it's easy to think that because somebody paid you that you're worth that MH maybe not so going back to the question of consistency the answer basically is even though there's variance in performance on each individual spot the brand is looking at it as in as you know this is within standard deviation this spot didn't so horribly underperformed that we think the next bet is not worth it and they're basically just looking to normalize over the long term as long as the relationship seems like a good one and has long-term prospects yeah and there's there's secondary factors like one of the things that we look at now

when we're booking creators to promote nebula we like yeah obviously we're looking at CPA we want to spend this much money and we want to have this much money come in from those new customers otherwise we're just setting money on fire that's not a good way to run a business but there are sometimes creators who they underperform a little bit but their videos get so much watch time on nebula that we understand that the value of this Creator might not just be in how many signups they get but in how long the retention curve is for the customers who stay if somebody signs up for Thomas Frank and then you keep promoting and they stay for four years so we have a lifetime value of four

years that is good for us the value of a customer went up so the CPA can kind of go up okay if somebody comes in and signs up for you and then no matter what we do your lifetime value is two months it's not just so things get even more complicated because you can look at your average lifetime value of a customer but if the people I bring in stay a lot longer right that CPA number the cost per acquisition CPA that is how much I want to spend to get a new customer uh kpi key performance indicator which are like here is what drives us here's how we build our campaigns these are the numbers that we care about so if my kpi is cost per acquisition and I want to spend $25 how

do I get to that $25 number what magic formula tells me that $25 is the right answer is it because the service costs more than $25 that'd be a dumb way to do it yeah uh it could beemp and overhead everything right uh for us you take a look at how much the service costs and we uh so if somebody signs up nebula.com Frank uh if they sign up for a year they're paying $30 if they sign up on the monthly plan they're paying $5 a month mhm so if they stay for a year on the annual plan we get 30 bucks if they stay for a year on the monthly plan we get 60 bucks yep so you would think we want you on the monthly plan because we make twice as much money except they don't except

people who come in uh people who come in monthly don't typically stay as long as people who come in annually right uh those people you know you can't cancel for a year you keep checking back in as you're reminded of it even if you don't watch every week or every video um so you get reminded of the service that the service exists you come back you check something out and over time it sort of becomes routine and then when it's time to renew it's like yeah let's keep that going you've had more time to kind of uh get invested or get bought in as this part uh being part of your routine and for a service like us you get to see the ways in which we grow and change and expand

over time for the monthly folks doesn't quite work that way they might decide well they watch the thing they wanted to see they'll cancel the next month so they can save money that's perfectly fine but what we know is that the annual customer is worth more on average even though they pay us half as much money we take the average lifespan of a customer what is the lifetime value the lifespan of a customer times how much money they'd pay us the lifetime average lifetime value LTV another three-letter initialism conventional wisdom industry standard you want your CPA Target to be onethird of the average lifetime value so if I make 45 bucks lifetime of a customer I want to spend 15 conventional

wisdom say sure or you could extrapolate that because our Target would be $25 let's say um that the average lifetime value would be $75 or um if our Target CPA is $50 you would extrapolate that our lifetime value must be50 well then you look at how long does it take to get that $150 that's also a right because there's time value money but there's also how quick does it come in and hence how quick can you resend it redeploy it for more marketing or more building or whatever right so I might be able to recognize the revenue this year but if I don't have the cash until the end of the year monthly is on paper twice as much money but annual means I have the money

in my pocket today and I can turn around and I can spend it right so if you say average uh the CPA Target $25 and we pull in from an annual subscriber 30 I IM immediately have $5 in my pocket and then $25 to pay somebody to go get someone to sign up again yeah so there's a cyclical nature to it and there's math the point here is that for me it's the number uh the lifetime value of a customer is really important and that's a thing that I can say generally lifetime value is $75 I should spend 25 to acquire a new customer if that is the math I've settled on and you leave affordance for VAR things and you've got room for overhead and whatever but for a subscription service one3 right so let's

say $25 easy math I know because you use a tracking link nebula.com value your average lifetime value is twice as high should I still pay $25 right you should more or is it worth well I mean more but is it worth paying twice as much if it's still if it takes twice as long to get the return on the money probably not twice as much because you take it takes so long to get right the revenue to redeploy right but it does tell me if your if customers who come in through you are worth more money even if you underperform a little bit I can let that slide because I understand that the Delta between the total and your value is different so the way I look at CPA

targets and how well you're hitting them can be different between you and you know standard median whatever uh and we're I'm using handwavy numbers for Math and I couldn't tell you with a gun to my head what your numbers look like for conversions but my point is that like as a sponsor when you come back or if I want to work with you again the data the targets that I care about might change a little bit based on other factors so while you should be getting as much conversion data as you can from the sponsor it's also important to understand how effective you are for that sponsor in other ways if you can get conversion data good if you can get retention data even better knowing that

that you can pull in uh a thousand customers at a $25 Target CPA you could say well I'm worth $25,000 but that's a General Target CPA if you know that your retention is twice as high you can argue for more per acquisition mhm so generally speaking uh sponsor uh a marketing person at a given sponsor will have these targets and there's a range there's uh all of the different creators they work with and then they have the overall numbers they want to hit so they're looking at a portfolio and across all of this they know that the marketing department maybe them or somebody else on their team or their boss has set this is the goal this is the budget so they're not

even necessarily looking very uh specifically at you like you the Creator as long as they're hitting their target and making their boss happy like it's kind of good right what you don't want to be is the creator who's so cheap that it offsets the expensive failure mhm what you want to be is the person who has cleaned down the middle okay you are the best money they spend you nail the numbers right on the line think of it like tuning a guitar you don't want to be sharp you don't want to be flat you want to be right on the Note okay if you can be that then they're going to throw money at you every time because you're going to help normalize their numbers I was going to ask you like

for a sponsor like um say brilliant are there other factors that would cause them to keep sponsoring say me at the same rate like is it just Tom's LTV for his customers he brings us is higher or are there like reputational aspects they look at are there like you know it's a good look for us to work with this Creator so this spot didn't do so well let's let's keep doing it yeah not as much as we'd like to think okay uh because there's so much data being associated with you good mhm but how good we tend to imagine as YouTubers that we are celebrities that to this audience we are famous because we look at 300,000 views per video and it's like 300,000 people love me

right maybe a few thousand people love you and the rest just were kind of there I assume most of them are like falling asleep right and I just happened to come on the TV you were yeah you were a pretty face in a thumbnail as they were scrolling by you are not headlining Coachella calm down not this year yet the and that's not even a bad thing it's just that we look in the sky and we see two Circles of roughly the same size we must assume that they are the same size right but one is the moon and the other is the Sun and these things are very different and when um I don't know Ben Affleck is promoting a product versus when you're promoting a product we could

say that uh Mr BEAST's uh squid game video got more views than Netflix has subs subscribers but if you were to go around asking people which they watch more Mr Beast or Netflix like Mr Beast videos are free to watch Netflix you have to pay there's a difference there immediately right the uh cultural awareness of this thing and the cultural awareness of this thing are very different and it's easy for us to think as creators as influencers as YouTubers that because I have this audience this many people love me this many people listen to me and therefore you must pay me because I am a select cele I have the Staggering star power where when I say thing just the association is a positive

look for you it can be to that tiny fraction of audience who's actually your audience right but what is that really worth yeah I'm reminded painfully of this every time I share music I like on Twitter it be like one like from someone who already listens to that band yeah nobody else cares the algorithm doesn't push it out no one you know they don't care what I listen to yeah they're like shut up even though my music taste is amazing sure uh but you know I talk about a new notion feature and everything goes bananas because my audience cares about me to a degree but what they mostly care about is what they come to me for right like what have I become representative of in their head

yeah what is The Logical Next Step somebody sees your Tweet why are they looking at your Tweet are they in love with you and they want to know everything about Tom and you're a celebrity or do you just post a lot of like numbered list tweet threads with productivity tips and they want those productivity tips and then when you say something about music they're like I don't [__] care what you listen to give me more productivity tips y not even in a grumpy or entitled way that's just not what they're there for yeah it's like uh in the music world like there's a band they're not your favorite band but you like a few of their songs you go to their show when they start

playing a song you don't know you go get a drink yep that's fine it's part of the arrangement not everyone who comes to the show needs to know every word to every song right yeah so the um brand association thing we're not celebrities so much more dependent on the data much more there I mean there's certainly again asterisks on all of this there are certainly types of creators who are like the top of a genre or the top of a field or they're uh they're associated with a certain kind of thing I think of like Peter mcon with a cannon or something Peter mcon with can a camera or Marquez brownley with uh any tech product Casey neistat uh there are creators who are so widely associated

with a certain kind of quality and I don't mean like production quality but like uh an aspect a quality to themselves that goes beyond parasocial it goes beyond aspirational it's kind of its own thing and for those types of creators yeah uh there might be having this person 's name uh associated with you could be a good look MH and you'll see sometimes Brands will ask Brands sponsors will'll ask about um can we get a license to use the sponsor thing in like can we get that clip and we'll run it as ads elsewhere I was about to ask like is that a good litmus test that you are that kind of creator that the brand that wants to put you in ads it's not okay like anything

there's good people and bad people there's I'd say more often there are good people who are doing bad things without realizing they're bad okay like there's some industry practices that are very Sharky that maybe it's not a person's fault maybe it's a process problem right so let's assume positive intent for a second somebody sends you a contract we're going to pay you $10,000 to sponsor your video and you're like awesome let's go love the product and they say cool uh we want it to be 60c integration we wanted to be at the front of the video and we want to be able to you we want a clean cut of just the sponsored section because we're going to run that on our socials you might go no

you should say no to that why do they want at the beginning of the video that's weird logical Next Step put the sponsor at the end of the video because the logical next step after seeing an ad at the beginning of a video is to hit the skip button till the video starts not go by product put it at the end where the logical next step is to hear what the person has to say and if it's a good fit the logical next step is to listen and then if it's a good product and the person is interested The Logical next step is to go purchase you put it in the middle of the video The Logical next step is to skip put at the beginning logical Next Step skip yep I think that's an artifact of

sponsors thinking that eyeballs equals conversions views equals conversions because they'll they'll say things like well how much retention is there at the end of the video yes it's like well obviously there's going to be less mhm but the number of people who would actually click and purchase is the same if not higher mhm nobody wants to leave your video in the middle of your video to go buy a product and if they do that's also bad for you are they going to come back are they going to remember to finish the video honestly probably not this is kind of an aside but I think of like the jobs to be done framework a lot and like if you put a video out there the job for the video to

do is to have people watch it right so if you immediately put an ad there and you're telling people click off my video and go buy this thing like you've sabotaged the job to be done of your entire video right away right like imagine you put on a concert and halfway through you tell the audience I want you all to leave right now and go to 7-Eleven and buy a Snickers bar and then come back and I'll finish the show right how many people come back yep how many people leave in the first place probably not that many people leave and of the of the ones who do very small percentage are coming back with the candy bar ready to rock yep and that's that's what we're

talking about here but when they say and give us the Clean Cut uh give us give it let us post that what they want is a free commercial so breakdown for me like why that's a bad thing it used to be that if I had a product or a service and I wanted to promote it I would have to go and hire a production company and uh a marketing team and the marketing people would put a camp Campaign together uh a proposal they'd put it in front of me I'd sign off on it they'd hire in the production company the production company hires in or brings in lighting people camera people Motion Graphics people editors uh audio people they would do music clearance they'd hire actors they'd build sets the whole

thing and we'd make a commercial and then I would take that commercial and I would go to TV networks and I would pay them money to show my commercial so we're talking hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars just to produce the commercial and then depending on when and where and uh whatever um the TV commercial is shown I have to pay every single time it's shown to anybody and that can be tens of thousands to millions of dollars to have my commercial shown that's to show that commercial to an audience of a couple hundred thousand people maybe a million maybe a couple million if it's a popular show or now I can go to an influencer and I can give you $110,000 and you'll do all

of it for me an excellent value for meh no wonder influencer marketing is so popular it is so much cheaper I can trick you into producing a free commercial and then giving me an extreme discount on airtime to reach the same number of people I would have reached on TV except now I have the brand Association of being integrated into the TV show that somebody was watching I'm not I'm getting product placement I'm getting Don Draper turning to the Cameron and saying by the way sign up for skillshare at the end of Madmen for 10 grand hell yeah I'm going to do that no wonder it's effective right uh so when they say I want a clean cut or I want the rights to be able to run it

on our social what they're saying is you're going to produce a commercial for us for pennies and you're going to run it as basically product placement on your show where you the main character in your show are going to look the audience in the eye and promote this it's not a commercial anymore that is a parasocial advertisement right not only that I'm also going to take your likeness in perpetuity and run it as a commercial on my own because you've produced this commercial for me for basically nothing I want to milk it forever am I going to pay you extra for that no probably not so the first part of this like this is what we're talking about running a sponsorship yeah uh

so the likeness thing is there is there like a right way to do it should you always say no should you say like you get a year and it's an extra five grand like how do you even negotiate that kind of thing you definitely want a time limit on it okay uh for a bunch of reasons if we were to do this let's say right now Squarespace came to us and they wanted you to do this okay let's say we would want to make sure that there's a term limit on it right we don't want it to be that two years from now there's still ads with your face promoting Squarespace and Squarespace has stopped sponsoring you and that relationship went sour but they're still using your likeness out

there to promote them and you now don't get to work with Wix or Shopify because you've got this weird indorsement deal with Squarespace that you don't get paid for so I've signed away my ability to work with any other Creator or any other brand of the space yeah like your ability to ever work with a competitor shot that's what they're really tricking you into they get a free commercial that they can run whenever they want and you never get to work with a competitor M CU why would they want you to so if we're going to do this there's got to be a limit on it so we could say a year okay and that seems like that's fair right okay you can do this for a year you pay a little bit

extra done right well I guess I now have a year where I can't work with right any of those Brands and Squarespace doesn't want to sponsor me again I've just given up 12 months of income in that vertical yeah so maybe what we should do if this were to happen then the move would be to put a like a one-year limit on it and then have them guarantee bookings across that time gotcha so almost like an endorsement deal where it's like right like we're in business let's yeah

we're in business let's be in business let's not half ass this [__] like let's actually do it if this is a partnership and you get to put my face up on your [__] then like we're in business like this is a real thing uh what I worry about whenever I see creators saying like oh yeah I don't mind it was a couple extra thousand dollars like I needed the money it's like we're poisoning the well for everybody here aren't we right because then it becomes an industry Norm right and YouTubers by and large are people who are younger and don't have extensive business experience or contract negotiation experience so what we end up with is people who think like well they

showed me a list of other influencers they worked with and those people all worked with this brand and they didn't complain and they probably did similar deals sure or I really want this deal I think it's GNA be great the money is good just take it yes and now they've normalized something now they've helped to set something as uh they continue to set precedent and they normalize bad behavior and then the next Creator comes along and somebody like me says you probably shouldn't do that and they say why not all of these other creators do it what's the problem mhm like the problem is none of you should have done it you're all getting paid less now because you sold

yourselves out right so there something you just mentioned that I wanted to ask about for a long time I have a theory on it I have no proof maybe you do you said a lot of influencers will go to a particular brand or a particular agency and they want to work with that agency or brand because another influencer has worked with them so I have this Theory um as far as I know standard is one of the only agencies that actually get conversion data for campaigns weirdly yeah maybe the only one and it actually goes and tells the Creator like hey you drove this many sales and they were looking for this CPA and that's why your rate is this um you know most other agencies don't do that so I've had a

theory for a long time that if you go to agency X and they're advertising that hey we work with this big YouTuber over here that YouTuber is almost like a magnet for other creators to come in and so even if that YouTuber doesn't convert very well or perform very well for their brand deals it kind of doesn't matter because the agency can sort of just like take from the smaller crators that get attracted to come work with them yeah we've seen this a ton so back in the day

in the MCN era the multi- Channel network era where it was lots of predatory deals where basically as a Creator you would sign with an MCN and they would get you a better deal on AdSense in exchange they would take a percentage of your AdSense Revenue so they might tell you your AdSense cpms will double and we take 10% and you might think well I'll take that deal be part of the thing uh and they would occasionally show up and offer you a sponsorship yep and you're thinking sometimes I even get brand deals and my AdSense rate is higher all I have to give them is 10% of everything forever what a wonderful value creators kind of figured out along the way that's not really how that

works and not a good deal mhm and the mcns uh because they could just take 10% of all of the AdSense Revenue they would sign every channel they could find I mean it's like a horrible incentive because they're incentivized to go get more channels not to help you right and the they were dumping a lot of their revenue into the biggest creators because they would attract smaller creators in but even worse than that you had people abusing the system by like going out and creating a bunch of [__] content Farm channels straight up just ripping copyrighted content and reposting it uh but because the threshold to get AdSense Revenue was so low and the rules weren't super

strict you could start a 100 channels reposting literally just reposting other people's videos and until you got caught that AdSense money was flowing in and you get caught you just start a new one start the whole cycle over again and so you've got a bunch of these channels out there that are producing no value but siphoning off AdSense money because ads were shown YouTube got smart and creators got really exhausted so from YouTube's perspective they said this is a huge drain on the psychological benefits to advertisers if advertisers know that we're putting this many ads on videos that aren't real videos or on uh channels that aren't real channels and are going to be taken

down it's a bad look and Advertiser were not super happy they created new thresholds for how long before you could uh be eligible for the YouTube Partner program the other thing they did is they said if a channel gets a copyright strike the MCN gets a copyright strike so just existential threat to all the MCN overnight and yeah and those channels you know if you're an MCN with 10,000 channels and you're one of them is getting a copyright strike every 15 minutes and suddenly like you've got a three strike you're out policy you're like [__] you're you're done in 15 minutes yeah like what are you going to do so suddenly the MCN shut all of those channels down the

money stopped flowing in the MCN dry up to one extent or another that's why they're not really a thing anymore they never really added value they were just a big um parasite and so that's the reason for the 4,000 watch time hour rule then too right mhm yeah you have to have a real channel that is watched by people over a period of time and enough subscribers to indicate that there might actually be something here right not a perfect system I've got plenty of frustrations with it I think especially for musicians who don't do highfrequency content but they're making art or filmmakers and musicians people who make lowf frequency high quality art it really sucks that YouTube can put ads

on my movie or on my uh music videos and they can put ads on those things and collect that revenue and I will buy definition never see a penny of it that's a bummer but uh generally speaking it's good because it means there are fewer of those just content Farm [__] setups so when we moved away from that it created a psychological Dynamic where creators felt like the problem with MCN was lock in you had to sign these contracts you were locked in so when agencies showed up they all did the same thing they would say we're going to bring you a deal would you like to work with audible would you like to work with Squarespace would you like to work with skillshare

we'll set that up for you no contract needed we'll do this one deal and you know we'll just bring you stuff sometimes you don't owe us anything beyond the commission on this deal and creators thought what a breath of fresh air no more lockin I know where this is going though because this was my first brand deal right uh so where this goes is now you've got agencies out there who uh will show up and offer you an audible deal and somebody might come in and say hey Tom audible wants to work with you would you like to work with Audible for $3,000 and you might think I'd love to build a relationship with audible that sounds great let's do it then they go to audible who they have audible's

phone number or email address they go to Audible and they say we got this guy Thomas Frank he's awesome only $10,000 for the video so Audible doesn't even know they have no idea they come to me first yeah and for various reasons and all kinds of weird behind the-scenes stuff Audible for a long time God what am I allowed to say there were people who were in charge of campaigns for certain sponsors who were buddies with people who worked for sponsor booking agencies like old buddies and so what they would do is they'd say yeah we have to fill our quota for these sponsors like keep bringing us stuff we'll leave it to you go find the creators bring them to us

and so agency would say great and they would flood YouTuber inboxes with would you like to work with sponsor would you like to work with Audible for $1,000 would you like to work with Squarespace for $1,000 they'd make up num send them out any return email any responses well that's you've just generated a lead and you now take you now have a product on the hook that you can take back to the agency representing these sponsors and sell it to them and they're like yeah sure let's test all of these things we'll see what works what doesn't when you look at as a portfolio play some will be winners some will be losers the ones that performed well get rebooked the ones that don't perform

well don't get rebooked the problem is that the Creator you have no idea what the sponsor has been charged you only know what you're getting paid so you don't know what their cut is but more importantly you don't know what they were expecting you to perform at right so you come in and say uh yes to 3000 and then the audible or whatever spot runs and they see the performance and they're like now we paid 10 grand for that it was only worth seven like we're not rebooking that no thank you never get another call even though you were more than double the value of what you were paid right because somebody in the middle charged so much extra that you weren't worth and had no

responsibility to that relationship you're now going to get nothing you have no relationship with the sponsor the reason the data is so important the reason the trans uh transparency is so important is because if you had known that you were worth seven and if these people in the middle this agency had a fiduciary responsibility to you to make to build and maintain this relationship as best they can then you would know what they commission was mhm you would know what you were worth and then when performance came back in and they said it wasn't worth 10 it would be worth seven these guys come back to you and say it would have been worth seven you would know that you're worth seven and

then the next sponsor you talk to and the next sponsor you talk to you can take that data and say well I'm worth this there's no more guessing or trying to estimate or reading the tea leaves to figure out what you should charge the sponsor you would know you would have a data point of proof you were worth this much to this sponsor on this date M the middleman here has all of the information and has no obligation to you and really no obligation to the sponsor except they want to keep bringing good stuff to the sponsor they're not going to bring you back you failed so they'll just churn through more creators right or they'll come back and offer you an absurdly low rate later where they're

taking 50 60% commission they don't represent you they don't technically represent the sponsor who do they represent themselves I guess yeah no joke so explain to me how lock in is bad explain to me how a contract is bad because what you'd get out of a contract with these guys is definition of their roles and responsibilities and you'd get transparency and if you don't get transparency in the contract don't sign the contract there's also worse than that for me so when this agency who will remain unnamed I guess for me not getting in trouble we should definitely not say it out loud um when they came to me they were like hey audible wants to work with you I think

it was actually three grand or maybe two uh but the contract you know there's no agency lock in but the contract says for six months after this spot runs you can't work with audible through anyone else so I'm not locked into the agency but I can't go work with audible any other way right and if they don't come back to me which they didn't I just don't get to work with Audible and I remember this was 2017 VidCon I met you uh I think I it was like two months after I had done my audible spot you couldn't book Audible for me for four months yeah uh I think it's also probably prudent to say that like our commission is 20% across the board doesn't fluctuate for any Creator it's

just literally 20% yeah I think pretty common every single Creator signs the exact same contract it's really important thing for us yeah 20% is industry standard M because of the type of thing that we do for a 360 talent agent like in the entertainment industry 10% is normal but they're getting 10% of everything you do and I am starting to see YouTube managers who take 10% of everything and I'm like so that's that includes patreon what are you doing yeah so like let's break down what are the pitfalls there if you get somebody who's just like hey I want to be your manager I get 10% actually a you was about a year ago a YouTuber came to me uh not a good fit for us and I think both sides

we knew that but you know friendly came to me and said I'm thinking about signing uh this manager who would be pretty dedicated to me and it's going to be really great it's a oneperson shop so I'd have his full attention it' be a 10% of everything and I said do not do it and he's like why not so what is this person going to do beyond the sponsor like what 10% of what like how far does that extend and he said it's 10% of sponsor bookings so great deal there 10% of

AdSense go on how are they earning that um 10% of patreon all right 10% of potential Equity deals and I'm like what does that mean and I pulled that thread and the example I was given was like if I did one of these things like spotter or jelly smack where they give me money to buy the AdSense value over the next this period of time uh then he would get 10% of what they paid me MH and I'm like you should never do one of those deals yeah never you there's there's no

situation in which the today money is going to be worth more than the accumulation of the AdSense that's a payday loan for the Creator economy you should absolutely not do it and now you've created it a dynamic where this manager will absolutely tell you should yeah because he's incentivized right he's going to get more money now MH he doesn't like oh he cares about your future for sure but also yep why not get some money now I mean who knows if you're even going to still be a YouTuber in five years let's you know let's stack the deck here and make sure he should be this manager should be the angel on your shoulder in this situation and you're

now creating a scenario where he is only incentivized to be the devil on your shoulder kind of a similar situation some friends of mine recently got pitched by a copywriter who said I don't have rates uh just pay me a percentage of the additional sales I generate and so he writes this copy and they're like it's it's awful but it's like very much built to just juice sales as hard as possible right now at the expense of trashing the relationship with the audience so it's it's a twisted incentive there because if you agree to that you're basically incentive iing them to get as much money of you out of you right now because they're not signing on to become a partner long term

they're just you know I get a percentage of whatever I generate for you over the life of this campaign so let me trash the relationship with your audience now in order to maximize my profit and then leave and this is a YouTuber yeah uh the other problem with that is let's say the video goes massively viral oh this wasn't for a video this was like it was a copywriter for a landing page for a product they were selling okay well let's say that they do some other promotion and again like maybe they do a sponsorship or something there's the point is there's a lot of things that could lead to that page suddenly getting a big burst that has nothing to do with the copy and now you're you're

disincentivizing yourself away from changing anything else MH because if you change anything else and there's a big spike well now you're paying this person for money that they didn't help you earn uh like what nothing about that makes any sense yeah so a big role for me uh both working with managers in terms of YouTube sponsorships but anything is I want to work with people who have to work to earn what they're earning so no cuts of AdSense no cuts of whatever uh

but additionally who are invested in my long-term success and want to make it a partnership there's a video that I point to all the time Link in the description probably uh Steve Jobs talking about consultants and it basically comes down to the problem with Consultants is the lack of scar tissue unless you've really been in it and had ownership of this thing what you have is a thin perhaps colorful two-dimensional veneer of what the reality uh and the pain of building something looks like when you can say as a strategy consultant or whatever that look my clients have gone on to do these big things like cool show me the list of your clients everyone you've ever worked with

does this group represent 100% of your client list or one% of your Client List how long did you work with these people was it over a period of years or did you come in and consult for a week and they were going to succeed with or without you there's just no way to know in a I work with these people or these people have written a nice pull quote for my website because we're friendly that doesn't tell me anything I Am Naturally skeptical on the verge of distrustful of

of Consultants especially in this business because it is really easy to sell a younger and less business experienced crowd of people who really want to succeed in a Fame driven influence driven industry it can be very easy to sell them the idea that Mr Beast did this if you just do this you'll get here right and look at all of these success stories everywhere you go on YouTube you can't throw a rock without hitting a YouTube success story therefore it must actually be easy if only you knew the right guy and when somebody like God bless him Jimmy Mr Beast will talk he'll take a call from every one of these consultants and like pick their brain right like he wants to learn

everything he can from everybody nom he likes to eat of all the information uh that's kind of what makes him cool is that he's over the years collected uh like a managerie of friends who are uh experienced and who have done a bunch of things and he'll he you know he'll he'll have a conversation with just about anybody but then when every one of these Consultants will now say that I've worked with Mr Beast yeah is he now validating are people now going to think that his success was somehow because of them we've seen people publicly take credit for Jimmy's success y when we can tell on the face of it that's [__] so the number of people who will uh come

in without any real responsibility to you the sharks who don't owe you anything there's no contract they will make their money whether you make more or not uh the incentive for them is to get in extract as much value as possible without burning the relationship get out and put you uh on a list on their website saying I worked with you that's do you think that's the only incentive no but if you are uh if you're out there looking for people to work with and who are you paying to manage your relationships and help manage your money how comfortable would you feel trusting that to somebody whose primary incentive is themselves and to juice the cash today

there's lots of today money out there you can sell the future of your channel for a check today absolutely you can more than ever there's plenty of payday loan companies that will take the future of your AdSense which could be worth millions and give you a $20,000 check and make you think that it's a good deal and there are plenty of bigname influencers who have done deals with those companies that they'll point to and say look he did it but you have to think about what are the incentives does this person work for me or do they work for themselves right you made a good point earlier about when there's a consultant bragging about their Client List you don't know if it's

100% of their Client List or 1% uh reminded me of a story that is a good illustration I think very old timey scam I think it goes back to the 1800s a guy would take out a thing in a newspaper uh or he sent letters this is what it was he'd send letters to you know a thousand people over here saying hey this Stock's going to go down and then send letters to another thousand people and say hey the Stock's going up uh well then whichever one is right you now have a pool of a thousand people who were like oh he got one prediction right and you just keep doing that so 500 you make another prediction 250 you make another prediction until eventually you have a group of say 50 people who are

like dang this guy got the last 10 Stock predictions right and now you should listen to him now you send him a you know now you send him another mailer saying hey invest with me and I'll grow your fortune yeah and you know all you did was just flip a coin 10 times but you told this group of 50 people the right answer AG 10 times and they didn't know that you were mailing a hundred times more people than that there's numbers games you can play there's obfuscation of reality that you can do and there's um cold reading like being able to go in talk to somebody about where their channel is and if you can see based on things that this person is saying that their trajectory is probably

definitely up uh like oh yeah we should work together here's some things that you should do and then when those things work because anything would work you were going to blow up regardless uh they look like a genius so I guess we should be fair and say like these are the incentives that exist in this area sure not necessarily that everyone operating in this area is trying to just burn through relationships no like I think there are people who genuinely do care but you do have a point that the incentives can easily get twisted yeah I don't I wouldn't even uh despite my skepticism and uh you and I have debated this a ton I would not say that my default position is that these are

bad people who are looking to scam you I would say that by and large these are probably good people who think they're giving good advice and they're implementing toxic business practices as a way to grow their stable of creators and advertise themselves there are people like you who you really like the Twitter format of listicle full of advice that's a thing you enjoy doing and you're pretty good at it but you're giving away advice like you're just sharing tips and sharing thoughts you're not really selling anything not really somebody could funnel down to find your notion tutorials or like it sets you up as a subject matter expert or whatever there's nothing inherently toxic about

it when somebody goes out and there's like 10 secrets to uh booking uh higher sponsor rates and I'll read through them like this is all either dead obvious completely wrong fabricated in intentionally or uh fabricated intentionally to fit some bigger narrative that pushes people to the next phase of the funnel people want to establish themselves as subject matter experts because it leads to he and I don't think it's because they're evil I think that they believe everything they wrote here in their book or in their course they believe everything that they're going to teach you in their uh their coaching they believe that stuff but then the things they do to get you there

in their mind the ends will always be justified the ends will always justify the means uh so when they're out there tweeting and it's like everything's a funnel everything's a funnel but at no point along the way is there any real value but there will be a couple of people somewhere in there who say oh no I talked to this guy he made a good point about this it's like well cool he made a good point or he's really nice I spent a ton of time talking to him good guy but is this right is this the best way to do this and what I worry about is if we're getting all of our information in the sort of infant stage Salad Days of the Creator economy if it's all tribal

knowledge if everything we have uh we've learned from Consultants or coaches um who may or may not have ever worked with a successful Creator what are we filling our heads with what is the tribal knowledge I've talked to creators who just among themselves were sharing like their accumulated knowledge and they would send me spreadsheets of like here's here's what we've seen in my community for what sponsor rate should be and it was stuff like oh yeah a sponsor should always pay a $30 CPM and I'm like what the [__] are you talking about right you think every view is equal in value that's insane that's not a real thing that's never been a real thing why would you think that and it's

because six or seven people who had an experience and they triangulated in on what they thought were the centerpieces of an experience right and they treated that as fact yep RIT large you get creators Again by and large younger people who don't have a ton of business experience who are very earnestly trying to find their way through an industry that only barely exists and there's not a ton of great resources yet and there are many sharks in the water and there are many well-intentioned people who will use Sharky business practices to sell what they think is a good product people falling into the Sharky business practice trap only confirm Ms for them that what they're doing is

correct we don't have a system we don't have regulation we don't have a system of governance or uh fact checking there's no Central bodies that can help understand these things and maybe there shouldn't be but there's also not as much as I'd like critical thinking about what are the Dynamics of this relationship that's why I want to make this like I don't have anything to sell around booking sponsorships and I you know let's call it a bias call a bias you're to an extent you're selling me or selling the organization I am and I was going to get to that okay like I personally don't have a course or I don't do coaching or none of that I have no desire I want to make notion

tutorials and program all day uh I've just done this a lot uh my bias is that I'm a part owner in standard and you run standard however I do not feel that is a compromising bias because I get the feeling the majority of the people watching this like you're not trying to get them as clients right now in fact I'm probably going to fill your inbox with a bunch of hopefuls that is going to you're going to have to go through and I'm sorry for that in advance um but I wanted to put something out there that was like good information from someone who was doing it day in and day out for a roster of clients that you exclusively represent so you're kind of

on the line for making sure that they are taking care of long term I wanted that to exist in the world yeah and I'll I'll defend my position here uh against the straw man that we're we're inventing as being skeptical of us the contract that our creators sign including you and me you and I have both signed the exact same contract as everyone else who is a part of this organization um I'm a Creator you are a Creator this is a an organization of creators uh for creators by creators Etc flowery language um 100% of the ownership of standard is creators mhm we really did build this um every one of the owners had to sign the same damn contract yep and all of the contracts

are the same and all the contracts are good and all of the contracts are on a 30-day rolling basis so now I and my team of 94 people uh have a Perpetual incentive to do the best we can at all times y we need to we are on the hook to be constantly providing and Demon rating our value because if not if we don't you can leave mhm this is an exclusive relationship and if at any point in this exclusive relationship you're not satisfied you can come talk to us about it you can complain we can work stuff out or you can go MH and sometimes people will go for any number of reasons not very often and when that happens it's like what can we learn from that was it a bad relationship fit did could

we have done something better and that's just part of life yep if you're never in a relationship it's hard to build and if the beginning of every relationship is a marriage it's hard to get to the point where you're willing to do that and so you end up not having relationships um so this notion of a sponsor booking agency with no real responsibility to you I mean no strings attached sounds nice right except they have yeah they have no incentive to help you beyond right getting their Commission on the last deal yeah and now there's traditional uh talent agencies who will do uh influencer marketing sponsor booking stuff for certain types of talent uh and those will be like 360

deals that you sign and you're just with that agency and they'll occasionally bring you sponsorships and in some cases even if you get your own you still owe them a commission which is but you know it's worth it because you're signed with that agency and they'll get you all kinds of stuff they'll get you uh The Rock will be a guest in your video but it's I've actually heard somebody uh they were told that if they signed with this agency The Rock would appear in their video they said it would happen yeah I'm guessing that didn't happen it did not happen I had a friend and again like there's so many names I want to name but I don't think I can I had a friend who was approached I think

by an MCN but this was like in 2020 or something and they were super excited because this MCN is owned by a giant media brand like very well-known media brand so he's like wow you know I am super in love with a lot of the things they've made and all this kind of stuff like I kind of want to join Tom can you look over the contract for me and so I look over the contract and I see the MCN is saying like we can help you get brand deals we can help you uh collaborate and do collabs with the other people who are sign with us we can do Channel reviews we will give you a free subscri ion to epidemic sound which costs $15 per month or something like that yeah notice I'm

saying can for most of these things so there's no obligation for them to do any of this and then on the Creator side the MCN would literally own any content that they posted during the per uh during the term own it so you lose all the rights to your content it's on your channel there was also language like we can put our logo on your Channel's header or in your thumbnails if we want to so I'm like you want to sign a contract where they're going to own your content they're going to get a cut of your AdSense guaranteed every month they get to plaster their logo over your channel if they want to and they owe you nothing other than a free music account

which costs less than they will take from your AdSense every month but they did save him $15 I guess they saved him $15 on his epidemic sound account which is not as good as a car insurance owning the content that is absurd yeah that it was the first time I've seen that one we don't even own the content for nebula Originals like the last thing I would ever want to do is anything where I own Creator content right that's like the most toxic and damning thing I can imagine doing MH if there's any one thing like I think next in line would be screwing up Creator money like not getting somebody paid would be really bad taking ownership of things they made without giving them money for it mhm wow

yeah not paid work just like oh I get to be associated with this brand in exchange for Association it's not even exposure it's just I can say I'm with them it's like a mob thing almost I'd like to break down like what are some of the criteria that people should keep in mind when considering uh whether to sign with an agency or work with an agency you know could be exclusive could be non-exclusive like what should people be looking for transparency look for Scar Tissue look for accountability look for uh the relationships that they have although that can be tricky there's there's certainly agencies out there that are like clustered up groups of YouTuber

friends where everyone is just kind of like in the click and then they'll bring others in and the idea is like if you sign this deal you get to be part of the click and that can be attractive but like what are you trading and what are their obligations uh I would say look at what they're on the hook for whatever the agency what are they promising you not vely not hand wavy we might what are they actually on the hook for MH we are on the hook we have an obligation to make a best effort to put a sponsor on any video you say you want to sponsor on we have an obligation to get you the fairest rate possible and the way we account for that is we negotiate for data we get as

much conversion data as we can from every sponsor we work with so that we can say here are the numbers here's what you're worth if you want us to go in and ask for more we can we don't have a good argument for it but we can go do that we have an obligation to help build and then maintain those relation relationships so if things are going south if things sour we have to be accountable for that and sometimes they that's unavoidable but we're always on the Creator's side if things are tricky we go to the Creator and it's what do you want us to do here's how we think we should navigate this what do you want me to do is there somebody are you signing a contract with

somebody you can trust to maintain those relationships because they are accountable for the relationships are you signing a contract contct with somebody who is going to be transparent with you about those relationships for example and this isn't a sales pitch but like the kind of thing that should be done uh we get through the contract ebits with any sponsor and the Creator and communication at that point is still between the Creator and the sponsor we don't get paid because we know an email address that you don't right if the only thing we have is a secret list and we don't want you to know who this marketing person is we're not adding value yep if you're ever thinking to

yourself I could just cut these people out of the email chain and save the commission somebody's probably not doing a spectacular job that's a conversation you should have similarly when you look at the contractual obligations and responsibilities who signs the deal with sponsor what do you mean like the Creator signing the deal versus you signing the deal right so we had a conversation with uh somebody from an agency on clubhouse a couple years back during that two week period when people use Clubhouse and um they were it was a few of us and then somebody from this other agency and then somebody from a sponsor and they were talking about how they and the sponsor had such a great

relationship and uh it say is there something in the phrasing around like uh We've we've brought them lots of creators or something or we've something that sort of like hinted that they were working for the sponsor and so I teased that out I'm like wait who do you have an obligation to in that relationship like is the deal with the Creator exclusive do you have a fiduciary obligation and the answer is well no it's non-exclusive like they can still get brand deals elsewhere too we just like help manage these relationships I like okay but like what happens if something goes wrong in that relationship oh we make sure that it doesn't right but if it does

is your obligation to back the Creator and support them or is it to back the brand and support them and he said well we'd like to think that we make both sides happy and it's like if somebody's getting sued I said okay who signs the contract does the Creator sign a contract with you and then you sign a contract with the sponsor they oh no the Creator signs the contract with the sponsor I said do you review it for them and like walk them through what it all means and they said no the Creator would be responsible for bringing their own legal counsel and doing contract review and it's like and if anything breaks down in that well it would be between

the Creator and the sponsor huh so what would you say so what exactly yeah what exactly is the value you're bringing to that relationship what is like who do you work for it doesn't sound like you work for the Creator and does you say you don't work for the sponsor so who like to whom do you have a legal responsibility the line goes dead for what felt like an hour which I thought was funny but the reality is that in that case there is no responsibility they signed nothing right they match made and then took money they introduced two people to one another and then got a commission for it mhm nice work if you can get so they're tender I guess right so in this

scenario the pain point the problem I'm pointing out here is that the Creator still has to go through the contract themselves they still have to do legal review they still have to understand all of this stuff and I can't stress this enough creator econom me the creators largely a group of younger people who don't have a lot of business experience don't have a lot of contract review experience and so suddenly every brand who comes along is putting a contract in front of you and you're just like I want the deals and you sign things bad precedent it's hard to know what you're signing up for every time sometimes they sneak stuff in not because they're evil necessarily

they might be um but it might be that like just legal put that in because it's boilerplate for a different kind of contract and they just reused over here yep I mean I had a contract with a brand not for a sponsorship or something else where it was like we get a license to any content youve ever made to use however we want and I'm like not only is that a bad thing for me but like I literally can't sign it because there are other parties who I would violate their agreements if I were to sign this yep there's um the stock footage companies that you had to get licenses from music companies you had to get licenses from of course you wouldn't be able to do that's insane so if

you're going to work with somebody whose job it is to bring you sponsors as your agency and they're still going to have you sign the contract with the sponsor what is it you'd say you do here right what is your role as an agency if you're not that buffer so I want a Tinder I can complain to when my date breaks up with me and they'll go do something about it uh what you want is a shield you want you want somebody who is managing the relationship who has skin in the game for any of our creators they never sign a deal with the sponsor we do yep every insertion order is between us and the sponsor and then we have contracts between us and the Creator where the Creator is on the hook for

certain things like it's stipulated in the like we expect that you'll uh hand in um like the sponsor reads for review uh two business days before publishing so that the sponsor has a chance to do that and then we tell the sponsors you have two business days to review this and if you don't then we just publish yep well they have expectations of us we have expectations of you have expectations of us we have expectations of them the money flows this way and if there's anything that breaks down we are there to make sure that you still get paid we are there to make sure that things get smoothed out because if we don't then suddenly we don't get paid anymore or if

you run into a problem they can't sue you because how bad would it be for us if a bunch of sponsors we work with start sponsoring a bunch of creators we work with well I mean we'd have to pick a side and the side that we would legally be obligated to pick is the creator in a world where you start suing creators working with yeah like if a sponsor were to say uh you deleted the video because of whatever now we're mad right I can say there's no provision guaranteeing that the video will be up forever mhm there a relationship issue there we're going to have to talk through this but you don't get to sue anybody for it I can say that if I'm in the contract

chain yep if the contract is directly between the sponsor and the Creator and the sponsor is grumpy and the Creator signed a thing they shouldn't have signed and nobody told them not to and the Creator says well I absolutely will not do that and the lawsuit ensues there's nothing you really can do or have to do we just go good luck guys yeah and but you still got your commission yep so like who did we serve in this relationship what relationship did we manage what value did we provide other than like hey you guys should meet give me money so I think we can add a very uh hard item to the list there uh an agency you work with should represent you yes which means ideally

there's a contract you sign with the agency that way the agency can be the one signing the contracts with the brands for you and then they go to bat for you if something goes wrong and look there's there's plenty of types of agency relationships where if an actor is doing a deal with a movie studio they don't sign a movie contract with their agent and the agent does with the studio but that's not what this is we have the resources we have a legal team our contracts have all been reviewed and we have the size and gravity and leverage to push back MH we should do that Collective action is a good thing going in and negotiating your own deal signing your own contract you're getting the

thing they were willing to hand you right or you're getting the thing you were able to negotiate isn't the point of somebody in the middle that they do that isn't the point of having an agency a management agency in this case for sponsor bookings isn't the whole point that they sort that stuff out and that what you're paying for is the leverage and scale that they bring to the table to get you a better deal or to get you better data or to ensure longevity in the relationship which is how you get sustainability I just don't understand why this isn't the default and I say all of this but the truth is that's actually really hard to find most agencies don't work that way in my

experience the other thing I would say is if you're going to work with an agency you should work with an agency that actually represents you and on paper in the contract has an obligation to serve you first and foremost versus the other party in a contract that's also very rare most sponsor booking companies don't sign the creators to a contract right which is weird it's like well we were talking about a minute ago uh it's it's like you're going in to get a divorce and you and your soon Tobe ex-wife both have the same lawyer and they don't actually owe either of you anything but you're both going to pay yeah what or it's like um you know getting a real estate agent and you find

out like the same agent is the seller's agent right which can happen and they have to do a thing and whatever um but you wouldn't want that no certainly shouldn't like why would you want your agent to be someone who is also ostensibly supposed to be trying to get the best deal for the seller right so we're going to get a divorce and we're going to use the same lawyer and that lawyer don't worry will the way they're going to get paid is a percentage of alimony wait what right that sounds like a bad deal it's hard to find there's only uh in my travels there's only a few agencies who even operate remotely like this and I wish that weren't the case but unless and until we see

more Savvy creators pushing agencies for these things we're not going to get them we're going to get go and sign with the agency for brand deals and then if that eventually doesn't work out people leave and they just go to the next agency and they just cycle through which is just a layer of abstraction above the current problem of hopping from sponsor to sponsor y so I don't know kids go and demand better from your agency anyone you talk to tell them that you will only work with them if they do X Y and Z that's kind of what I'm hoping for here is like to put out a list of essentially demands so more and more creators start asking for exclusive representation

ideally with a clause that lets you leave in a reasonable period of time if you don't like the relationship you know like we have 30 days and puts the agency on the hook for specific things that matter to you and where the agency is focused on getting you not just as many dollars today as possible but as much information today as possible because that information will lead to dollars when you understand what the kpis are when you understand what the target metrics for the sponsor are and how well you're doing then the dollars that's just math that's easy so let's get into that for a second and I want to wrap back around to it a little later because I do want to talk about

people who want to at least right now book their own deals there's going to be a lot of people out there who are like either don't want an agency or agencies don't want to work with me yet and I want to go pitch my own sponsorships like yada y there's going to be people like that uh so I do want to wrap around to this question for that crowd eventually but from the agency point of view how do you go about getting conversion data from a brand because the brand obviously knows what their kpis are but when you the agency go hey we want to know what your CPA is so we can set a fair rate how do you how do you incentivize them to actually give you the correct rate say

no so you just say I'm not going to work with you if you don't share data yeah and then how do you ensure you're getting the actual CPA uh work with more than one sponsor okay so it's really like an averaging thing yeah like you can see if five out of six sponsors are giving you data that seems pretty consistent and one is like oh you're way underperforming unless that I mean maybe that one sponsor genuinely it's not performing as well bad audience fit or something but chances are they're uh but like the truth is that if they're willing to share data they're going to share the real data okay they're i' I haven't I've never we've never caught a sponsor lying

in that way not once getting them to share the data tricky and the only way we've ever gotten a sponsor to share the data is by saying we will work with you if you share the data so it's just a contingency or not contingency it's it's contingent upon mhm yeah uh when we now when we go into any new sponsor meeting we let them know this is an open data relationship we'll give you demographics data we'll give you retention data anything you want to know about a video that you sponsor we're going to share that data with you let us know we'll share all the numbers you're going to share the conversion data we need to know what your targets are we need to know where each Creator landed and

because we it works as a portfolio the big biger we get the easier it is to get them to say yes for a couple of reasons one it's it saves them work because it's basically what they're doing we're doing a portion of their job for them in managing these things um it helps to balance out the rates across the portfolio which is good for them uh but also when you have a large enough collection of data uh and the data sort of normalizes you can see from month to month what the UPS are what the Downs are you'll see that yeah this one was a little bit lower and we can see on our end the metrics for that particular video were lower than normal when these things match up I mean it's it's not

an exact science like anything you're building a trust relationship and that trust will be strengthened or weakened over time we haven't we've never caught a sponsor lying to us or showing us things that didn't make sense it's always we've always been able to understand the data um but the big thing is when you have a number of creators you have l so we talk about things like action talking right you look at uh like the guilds in Hollywood the writer Guild the Director's Guild The Screen Actor Guild the power that they have is that if you want to work with writers There are rules that you have to follow okay as a writer you can't sign a deal outside of

wga rules M according to negotiated terms and you can't work in Hollywood as a writer unless you're in wga you don't get to be in a movie unless you're sag right Screen Actor guilded and if you do things or if you take less money or if you go outside of what the Sager proof guidelines are you get in trouble MH so the studios know that if they do things that are untoward uh to a certain group of writers because they could get away with it then the big writers will be required to take action along with the little ones that is collective action everyone working together you don't screw one writer over you're screwing all of the writers over you're not negotiating one

deal you're negotiating the terms of all deals like this is the foundational stuff and you know there can be additional things for a given writer or a given project but like bottom line here are the rules we don't have that for every one of us there's a 100,000 YouTubers out there m who can do whatever the hell they want so what do you do if when you say no like sponsor can just go to any of them right so much easier to get data in the first place when you have 180 creators behind you and you can say the only way you get to work with this group of creators who are demonstrated High performers is if you play ball right and we tend to uh there are certain genres

in which like if you want to sponsor creators that within that genre it kind of have to come through us right and so we put down the thing gabble I don't know um we put down our foot and say Here's the way in which we work and we don't go in and yell at them and say all right but you better share data yeah or we're going to be mad never going to work with you it's so much simpler than that they come in we have a conversation we explain how we work and how important the data is how much how much value that can help to bring them we're going to help you understand the portfolio of creators that you're booking and we're going to help you understand how those numbers can go up

and down over time it's going to save you a bunch of time and effort this is good for you and the long-term relationship is good for the creators M uh and we've hit a point now where more often than not the answer is like yeah that sounds great so it's much more like let's build a partnership yeah and if you're going to have a productive partnership then each side of the partnership needs to know what's going on any relationship is a partnership right ideally in this space uh when creators collaborate together to make something that collaboration is a form of partnership when creators hire people their team that's a form of partnership when creators work with an agency that

should be a partnership when creators work with a sponsor that should be a partnership if at any point these relationships are imbalanced and they fall out of being partnership then you should look at why that is and address what needs to change here so that this can be a partnership because you can get a sponsor to come in and pay you more than your worth MH and you will have a sponsor you will not have a partner and for some people cycling through sponsors fine they don't need Partners those people may eventually get very frustrated with the lack of new partners available to them or they may see that the landscape underneath them has changed in the beginning they

were getting overpaid and now two three years in they're asking for that same number or inflating it and they're actually getting underpaid relative to the value they could have delivered right if you don't have the data you don't know I'll add a little bit here on the Creator's perspective ever since I started doing brand deals I've always wanted it to be like a win-win every time so like number one has to be win for the audience MH oh of course yeah yeah like the audience is the partner as well and if it's not a slam dunk for them you know rage Shadow Legends could come and say I'm going to give you a million dollars for a sponsorship and I'd say no because it's not a win for my

audience like I literally don't care I have enough faith in myself that I can make the money I need to make without selling my audience out and throwing them under the bus is this sponsor a logical Next Step but beyond that like win for the audience win for me because I'm getting paid my fair rate but it has to be a win for the brand too yeah like and I'm a business now too like I sell products so I'm on the other side like if I'm going to work with influencers to help me sell my products I want them to see the relationship the exact same way I not want them to be like oh here's the talking points let me just read them to the camera check off the boxes and take my paycheck I want

someone who's going to be like all right well I am now a marketer for this product and I'm going to do as good of a job as I can and that is extended to um me sending critique on talking points or me literally like I've redesigned landing pages for sponsors because I'm like your landing page is bad yeah you're not going to get conversions if I send my audience to this landing page it's also good for you more conversions more money yeah so that's I've always

thought as like why wouldn't you want to give me the data because if you give me the data it's not like I'm going to you know be like haha let me take more money because I'm you know I'm overperforming it's cool like I should be paid better if I'm overperforming but if I'm underperforming give me the data so I can see what I can improve the next time around and if I have the data on 10 different spots and I can see these two did really well now I know how to write my ads for all my future videos if somebody says well I'm only going to take $100,000 and you know they can get somebody to pay that at some frequency they're going to feel like a winner except if they just started at 50

and built those relationships and learn from the data then two years later instead of still getting 100K per they might be at 200k per yep and then what does that extend to in the future and what are those relationships the other thing and I keep saying this I don't mean to infantilized but uh YouTubers tend to be a younger group of people without a ton of professional experience it's it's easy when you're in your 20s to miss the fact that the people that you're working with today at these sponsor companies these are people who are in the Creator economy these are influencer marketing professionals yep you are an influencer doing influencer marketing do you think that this is the

last interaction you'll ever have with this person exactly do you think that nobody who you burn Bridges with will ever be in a position to help you again you have to build these relationships because if you think you're still a YouTuber in 10 years you should probably rethink how you're playing the game yeah I mean careers are long I'm slowly becoming a programmer the world is much smaller than you think there are people I went to school with and I became a YouTuber and I'm like I can't see how I would work with this person now but like now I'm 32 and I'm like oh I might be able to actually do something with that person now 10 years into the career I don't like burning relationships in on

any front because there's like the process the role the individual right is this a thing where I'm okay with the process not working out between us I'm okay with our roles not being a match I don't want to do anything where as people you avoid working with me in the future right uh I'm not a fan of venture capitalists M um that like I don't uh coming from the software industry I've I've never wanted to be part of that culture I've never had a good experience with it and now I see Venture capitalists doing stuff in with Creator economy businesses and it makes me really itchy however I have friends who I know from one thing or another who are doing

the Venture Capital thing now and my responsibility is not to say well you're awful you're terrible burn or I'll work with sponsors who are VC backed and I'm not going to go in and say well because you're VC backed you must be terrible right we can set aside these differences we can have interesting conversations and we can build stuff or maybe it doesn't work out and we don't want to build things but understanding that this person who's a VC bro and coming to me wanting to do thing a today I don't need to be a jerk to this person MH because chances are one of the companies they invest in could do something really interesting or could want to reach out to our creators and having a positive

relationship means that person will probably be more likely to think of me and say hey let's get some stuff together with this thing that I'm working on Yep this actually happens all the time people that I worked with 10 15 years ago hitting me up because like hey you're in this space now I'm doing a thing what do you think of this and then New Opportunities can be forged out of that when you go around and every single sponsor you talk to is you taking a $100,000 check when you should have gotten a $50,000 check and all of those people are like yeah that was not worth it right do you want everyone in town to have the idea the image that they have in their head of you is that

you weren't worth it right damn that will pay off yep just not the way you want right so win like triple win is what it has to be uh okay so we talked a lot about the collective bargaining here and one point I will make on the collective bargaining Before we or I guess collective intelligence actually uh I talked earlier about how you know if a sponsor is actually sharing data and I can see two spots that did very well that compounds when you have a collective because we all talk and maybe one person's like hey I tried this for this brand and it worked like Gang Busters I can take that as a data point and try it myself and maybe it doubles my rate or something uh

that's useful as well so yeah I think that uh talking earlier about consultants and strategy coaches and courses and all of this most of those people from what I've seen behind the scenes and in things they've shown in public most of what they do is repeat things that they've heard other people say either on Twitter or that they took a class now they feel like they're an expert and they want to pass on the class thing I see a lot of conversations behind closed doors amongst creators and the things that they share with one another and then I see coaches going out coaches who I know have friends within that group going out and saying things that I've heard creators say so I have

imagine that what you really want is not a coach or a consultant what you want is better friends yes what you want is a community what you want is to be part of a group of people who are sharing that information because these coach people uh however lovely they might be and however altruistic their intentions may be um the information they're getting is not like it's not mined from the Earth's core yeah uh it is forged in experience and that experience comes from a collection of creators going through these things and then sharing that knowledge or it comes from relationships with the platform where the people who are you know pulling the levers and building the machine will

communicate how it works and collecting the data and the experience and um learning the tools over time is a thing that a Comm Community does MH Even in our case so much of what we know is because we are a collection of creators and when you're a collection of creators and you all talk to each other that can lead to tribal knowledge so like check your work but if you've got a strong community of creators who have found success chances are there's going to be some really interesting nuggets of information there and the stronger the community over time the more you'll be able to like verify that this concept works like early on one of the things we learned which is default practice now

is if a video is underperforming try changing the thumbnail and we thought in the early days that the magic was somehow when you change the thumbnail it resets the algorithm that's tribal knowledge [__] we really thought that I've said that to people the reality that we know now is when you change the thumbnail people see a better thumbnail and they're more likely to click it yep when you take a second swing at a thumbnail you're not just making it different you're probably making it better you're making a thumbnail with the knowledge that nobody click the first one so even if you weren't going out of your way to make a better one you're probably still making

a better one of course that's going to bump it up there's also a huge value in being part of that Community long term like we used to believe that you need to turn AdSense off for sponsorships to work and that might have actually been true it definitely was time what we don't know is when it stopped being true right so like if you're not part of a community that's constantly doing the work then you might get AES of advice that was true at one given time and then you just go on thinking it's true forever yep and in this case maybe you keep AdSense off forever and you're throwing money away yeah in the early days we had plenty of data science evidence to show that videos with

AdSense on performed uh weaker than videos with AdSense off what we've since learned is uh one I think the market matured but two the tools have matured a little bit and now what you can do is you can manually Place ads and you can make sure that none are placed within 2 minutes of the sponsor read yep because again logical next step if you get to where the ad Read's about to start and an AdSense ad kicks in and then when it comes back it's into sponsor read nobody stand around for that I guess there's like a quotable here like if you're in a changing meta and you're hanging out with people who aren't playing the game you're just going to have old information uh or you're paying coaches

with the hopes that they're in the communities for you yeah and hopefully they're getting updated information and they're sharing accurate information and it's it's not you know with an ulterior motive that's not good for you no and and there's plenty of really great resources out there today um following uh our friend Renee Richie the Creator liaison I think Creator liaison on Twitter he's always sharing nuggets and he works very closely he's he's a YouTube employee and he's also one of our creators one of our owners so he is a person who I've known for well over a decade I trust the guy with my life and I know that he has insight into the YouTube machine that I can't he's in

meeting that I'm not going to be in and so when he says the thing works like this I have zero reason to believe that he's lying to me MH he has no incentive to lie to me yeah his goal is to try to share information so when I tell people go follow Renee and listen to what he says or uh follow um there's a handful of accounts I want to put in the description but like uh following Todd the guy who runs the algorithm Todd will definitely be in the description if if uh if you want to know how the YouTube algorithm works I recommend you follow the guy who's in charge of it and when he says when you're concerned about uh Al like the algorithm doesn't like this or doesn't like that replace the word

algorithm with the word audience that's not a handwavy [__] thing he's doing he's telling you how the Machine Works you can choose to ignore that at your own Peril and I've certainly seen people do that uh or misunderstand what that means like take it in bad faith but if you take a step back and look at the resources and collect all the information and parse what that means to you and have conversations with other creators about what it means to you what it means to them how do these things apply to your particular situation getting context and perspective outside of yourself and your channel uh this is how you grow getting into a group of people who are playing

the game and if you can get a person or a group of people in that group of yours who are playing uh a different game with another part of the industry say like an agency who are working directly with Brands and getting actual conversion data or you're uh at least listening to if not building relationships with people who work at YouTube like the more your network grows and the more you get qualified people who are at the top of their game in your network the better information you're going to have so whether or not you sign with an agency like be building that network of active players yeah it's it's it would be easy to say well sure you can say that because you're a successful creator mhm

of course you know we weren't born knowledge of who but you know what creators love talking to other creators you know what creators love watching YouTube videos every year when it's not co uh we go to uh Anaheim for the VidCon thing yep and it's always like oh I'm going to meet up with so and so or you go to an event and two people meet each other you're like oh I love your videos I watch your stuff all the time as contemporaries as peers as colleagues people say this to each other if like whatever level you're at I mean if you're getting any views at all if you've made more than a couple of videos chances are someone in the room has seen

your stuff reach out to creators yep say like I really love your stuff I'd love to chat I'd love to pick your brain on something mhm this is not like a Walled Garden I wish I had known that early on I think uh might not have been as true then but certainly now like the best and brightest creators I know are really into talking to other creators and like building that Community because the creators who I would consider best and brightest now uh from anyone that we work with up through Jimmy uh one thing they have in common is they recognize that the small Creator who wants to chat with you today is g to be the Creator who's who's lapping you tomorrow and you're going to wish you'd

made a friend so to sort of wrap this section up before I go into the next big thing that I think a lot of people are going to want to know about uh I had started building like a list of things people should look for in agencies you had said you know buyin are they serving you uh and I think that's all very important like are they building this long-term partnership with you what are the markers when you get the pitch like what are the questions you should ask and we have already mentioned like you know the rolling contract what's the actual commission they take is that the same for all creators are there any other things that people should be specifically looking for are you getting

data from the sponsors do you have a real relationship with the sponsors what is the relationship like with your creators uh what does the contract look like and can I talk to the folks you work with now I would say to any creator that we are in talks with uh whenever they'll mention like oh I know so and so who works with you and usually the conversation ends with like next steps we'll send you the contract Etc and I always say you know ex person go talk to them whatever they say about us that's true MH whatever their experience it's true every word I cosign and if somebody says I'm you if they don't know any of our folks but they say um like I'd love to chat with this

person or that person I'll reach out to that Creator and say do you mind if I make an intro and then it's always like a add move me to C BCC have an honest conversation whatever you say goes U that doesn't happen as much anymore because all of our creators come in through creators yeah so there's always a pre-selected um uh introduction but the important part to me is that we don't work with somebody who hasn't we wouldn't want to work with anybody where we wouldn't be comfortable with that person sharing their experience if there's anyone we work with who I wouldn't feel good about them telling somebody else a story then we need to

fix that first right so if you're going to go work with if you're going to go sign with an agency you're thinking about signing with an agency talk to the other creators on the roster not just one or two that the agency Cherry picks for you to talk to like talk to people who are like you roughly at your level roughly your genre see what their experience is like do you think it's important for an agency to publish their entire roster yes okay so there's another thing the agency should show everyone they're working with not just a few magnet creators or something yeah because if uh if you aren't able to publish the list of creators why not mhm is it because you

don't actually have contracts with these people and you don't have the right to share a list because they're not actually your client right uh or is it because they wouldn't necessarily want to be associated with you or is it because you're trying to jealously guard your client list so nobody can come and poach them in which case if that's possible maybe your relationships aren't that strong right we have from day one always published our entire Client List M if somebody wants to come and try to poach somebody like come try yep we'll hear about it and we'll have to like make a better offer right if it comes down to that um I don't know what that would look like in this case but you know

because everybody get the same contract but like we would have to re-evaluate the relationship and how we're approaching it versus um you're here because you're not allowed to leave right so if everyone's allowed to leave whenever they want to and our list is public you could come try and poach and people don't leave why must that be one would assume that it is because the relationships are strong enough and if for anyone we work with that isn't the case we need to go and fix that we need to rebuild that relationship and adver um strength so uh for a Creator looking for I feel like I'm selling us not what I want to do uh if you're if you're looking for someone you should

you might want to work with um look at the strength of their relationships and look at how resilient those relationships are designed to be another one that I would add and I don't know how you could evaluate this probably through talking to other creators but uh make sure the agency will go to bat for you if say a brand is asking me for too many revisions or they're like hey has be in the contract really yeah stuff that like needs to be in the contract like will he go B for you and enforce the contract but also you know if a brand is doing something that is uncool are they getting in front of it are they handling it for you or are they sort of just stepping aside and being

like figured out and is there enough relationship there that you can be flexible on either side there's certainly been cases where a sponsor has come back and ask for something and it was technically outside of scope but it was early enough or it was a re actually this is a pretty good idea maybe we should do this and we'll go to the Creator and we'll say like it's probably a good relationship move and it probably really would help this thing you don't have to you can say no but like what do you think like I would do it what do you want to do and most of the time the C is like yeah I may as well just do it y like you know what I can add that line no problem it'll take

me two minutes or I can cut that thing out that's kind of confusing not a problem at all not about revision uh or it's not within the revision round thing it's more of like a side request because that wasn't part of the talking points but like oh hey would you mind sometimes you just do that because it's a nice thing to do right and if is super rigid and there's no relationship then you don't get to like navigate that in the same way yeah so again it's going back to the win-win yeah and you sort of acting as a partner for the brand yeah similarly I would say uh we have had creators referred to us by sponsors have told creators like you should go work with those guys it's a

great fit um not as a matter of selling us but like that relationship should be there and it should be strong enough that like everyone feels good about it and on the sponsor side there should be a little bit of tension but not that much mhm um the other big thing I would say is look at genre if someone is a prank video creator or a beauty vlogger like there's a ton of genres of YouTube content that we would not serve well at all right and sometimes we get like for whatever reason a week or two ago I got a bunch of emails from Minecraft video creators okay it's like that's not what we do it's not a good fit best of luck to you they should have gone and looked for an agency that

specializes with that kind of Creator because they're going to understand that kind of relationship and what those creators will need and the sponsors that uh would be best suited for those sorts of creators we serve a collection of genres expanding over time but you know you can't can't get everything I think that's an important point to make like we have a lot of creators we have a lot of relationships but we can't have every relationship and we can't understand every Niche perfectly right so there's going to be other players that are going to serve other niches better MH that's just the way it goes yeah like we just can't be everything to everyone yeah I've I've certainly had

conversations with like vtubers uh and with beauty uh creators those are people who like they're awesome and we have great conversations but I look at their business and it's like I don't know how to add as much value for you as I could for somebody who makes Logistics videos or video essays about movies you're doing a different thing our machine isn't built for that so like let's be friends and keep sharing information cuz I'd love to learn from you but I don't want to put you in a position where we're promising you a thing we can't deliver gotcha so another big one make sure that the agency understands your Niche yeah uh if a Minecraft Youtuber comes to us I'm just like I

don't know what you are yep well there's like there's uh like kids content can be uh animation content sort of verges on the edge of this where when the primary audience for a channel is young very young people how does that audience even respond to a sponsor right can you get sponsor dollars when your audience is and like analytics will say it's all people who are 35 it's like yeah because their parents YouTube account they're 30 uh so you can't really trust the data on that but you just know right there's things you can triangulate how do you serve that audience yep how do you serve the Creator for whom Their audience is like

eight years old exactly I don't know I don't know so people who are intentionally making content for children I wouldn't know how to help that Creator okay so there's a group of Creator who either they don't want to sign with an agency or they're not there yet um I happen to know creators who are in very uh you know small niches like how to take care of your pool my friend Matt runs the biggest pool care channel on the internet uh would he be able to sign with an agency maybe not would he be able to go and pitch a brand directly who sells robot pool cleaners on a brand integration almost certainly yes um so for that group of people but also maybe

for the group of people who are going to sign with an agency and um they're trying to P they're pricing their first spot like how do you price your first spot we've talked a little bit about how you want to air on the side of maybe a little lower than your worth so you build a strong first impression and you can help you know make that relationship Blossom but how do you even land on what your rate should be in the first place erir on the side of not charging too much not erir on the side of charging too little if you have to choose between one or the other then undercharging is better for a relationship are you maximizing for today dollars or tomorrow dollars yeah so to be clear on that I'm

not advocating that anybody get intentionally underp yeah I don't unell yourself but if you're like say you're like I'm not sure if 10K is right like go for 9 versus 11 but if I'm brand new to this and I'm like I don't know if I'm worth 10,000 or 1,000 yeah like what sort of markers can we look at to set that initial pricing bad version terrible metric but you got to start somewhere M if you're pulling in about 100,000 views per video and you're not on camera about $1,000 is not a bad place to start okay if and everything's a flowchart uh if you have an audience not the audience you're not getting 100,000 viral views per video but you've got like 20% views

from subs and you've got a decent amount of returning viewers um then yeah sure like $1,000 per 100,000 why not okay uh if you're on camera you can probably go higher if you've got a really attached audience and a strong Pat on you've been doing this for a little bit then 100,000 views might be worth $5,000 it might even be worth 10 but looking at how strong how strongly do you believe that the audience who watches your videos does it on purpose and how much do you think those people care about you if you've got a strong patreon and you're making money there assume that those people do care and they're watching you on purpose okay charge more but as a bottom line

here's a place to start $10 CPA or CPM is okay it's a [__] number and for people who don't know CPM is cost per 10,000 views cost per Mill yeah cost per Mill that's price per 1,000 views uh a $10 CPM for sponsorships is not the answer but if you need a lump of clay that you can shape into the right answer it's a lump of clay yeah and I guess to provide people with like I feel like giving people numbers that other people had is not necessarily the best thing because they're going to Anchor toward it but like with my channel we eventually got into a rhythm where my videos would get between 1 and 200,000 views and they were basically always worth 10 to 12K but I started my first ever

sponsorship was 4K and they wanted a full integration so I did like a mid-roll ad and they wanted a video that was very tightly uh about skill acquisition cuz it was skill share and then the first spot I ever did with you was 2K for at the end of the video you know maybe my audience was worth 10K per video back then and I took two but obviously it quickly scaled up and we converged on the right rate and then it stayed there and I had 10 grand per video four times a month coming in for like five years yeah uh are you are you mining or are you farming right these relationships if you're mining the ask for a giant absurd dollar amount right and I've seen I mentioned this

earlier but I've seen a community of creators where they had one person go in and ask for 30k on a 1 million view guarantee mhm and get it and then because that worked somebody else did the same thing and they were able to get it and maybe a third person did it and now it's like okay well if that worked three times the answer must be $30 CPM and So within that Community everyone defaulted to anytime they would do anything with the sponsor they would price it at $30 CPM and so they had a spreadsheet with all of the deals they' done proving that brand deal should always be $30 CPM right when all they've proven is the brand said yes to a $30 CPM three

times yep that's not science okay uh so if you're a voiceover Channel and you have 20% views from subscribers and you're still relatively new at this $1,000 so a $10 CPM $1,000 for 100k views sure if you're on camera highly parasocial um giving lifestyle advice and you get lots and lots of comments and engagement you've got a really strong patreon ask for more do you think patreon should be used as a stepping St to Brand deals I think that it's a good metric I will often look at uh if a creator has a patreon I'll look at how well it's doing M and if it's a large dollar amount or a large number of patrons it's like okay there might be some there this is somebody who can like activate an

audience who cares about them that's interesting if they have no patreon I don't know I can't tell you anything or if they have a patreon where it's like uh a barely watered plant and there's a relatively low number of patrons or a small dollar amount it's like that could be that they've just not put any effort into it or it could be that the audience doesn't love them there's no clear if this then this correct answer here there just can't be yeah I mean we're talking about the widest breath of content in the world and many potential different advertisers so there's there's no real answer here yeah it's it's like uh how much should dinner cost right no other information just how much

should you pay for dinner how much should a meal cost right well am I having dinner or is it like am I having dinner at 700 am I having dinner at like 5:00 p.m. like an old person am I having dinner at McDonald's or am I having dinner at a Wolf Gang Puck restaurant right a lot I don't know and even from a McDonald's in um New York City versus a nice restaurant in uh rural Kansas MH or a McDonald's in rural Kansas versus a nice restaurant in New York City these things like location matters and there's like a million factors here you can't there's no one single answer that can explain it and so I don't want to lead anybody

to believe that I think that there's here's what you do a lot of it is Instinct a lot of it is like you look at it you kind of feel it up but ultimately air on the side of relationship is this somebody that you want to be working with later right and if this if it's it's a good sponsor that you would like to build a relationship with go in and say I'm willing to bet on you MH you share information about how well I perform I'll start low if you give me that information and if I overperform we make it up on the next one I like that a lot so I think that actually is the perfect answer uh and I will ask my follow-up question anyway but I like the answer being let's start

low we can use your metrics as like the bare bonus to Frameworks but let's make a partnership and if I overperform let's make it up in the next one I love that and that's basically what we done together yeah okay so I wanted to ask you how do you feel about affiliate marketing as a way to get data before you go pitching brands on prepaid deals again uh it depends on genre depends on Creator depends on the affiliate depends on uh God so many things but the audience is sad and they have recognized that there is a type of sponsor and there's a collection of sponsors and this means something seeing Squarespace over and over again seeing skillshare over and over again

they became a mark of quality I remember uh I think it was Sarah Zed 100% natural respect women juice uh the first sponsorship she ever did was Audible and there was concern right like there was there were one or two comments on that video about like you took a sponsorship you sold out and there was a moment of like oh God right but then you look through all the comments let's just command f for the word audible you go through the list and it was it was like two or three complaints and then dozens literally dozens like oh my God you've been sponsored by audible now you've made it right that's interesting the audience Associated the sponsorship with a mark an external Mark

of quality like a band getting signed to a record label in this new weird Creator economy there's no governing body so the external Mark of quality the seal of approval has to come from somewhere it's like some of these brands are seals of approval right if you know in the same way that the trust relationship is I see on your videos every time you've always got a quality sponsor that's relevant to my interests even if it's not relevant to me right relevant to your audience there's always a logical Next Step component there's always a I believe in you the sponsorships that you run on your channel you holding up a mirror here's how I see you audience and if that mirror is distorted and I don't

like what I see I can start to mentally psychologically self- select out right if you say to your audience I think you're a person who wants to better yourself and I'm going to show you products for people who want to be better I might think to myself I don't want that product but I am a person who wants to better myself if you show me hey audience I think you're a [__] rude and you'll buy any [__] thing I sell you because I got paid I'm going to think well I'm not a [__] rubbe maybe this guy's just a sellout prick and that's going to build over time that trust relationship matters but it also goes the other way if I'm used to seeing quality videos that end with a

skillshare ad MH if I'm used to seeing quality videos that end with a brilliant ad I know that there's an association there and I will as much as I'm learning to trust you the Creator I'm also learning to trust that brand MH that brand is now a mark of quality so when I see brand I know sponsor I know Creator I don't it flows the other direction so if you can get some of that juice out of the squeeze from an affiliate deal good that can be something but the audience is Savvy enough to know that link is going to be sponsor. tldc Creator name and if what you put in there is affiliate do garbage links robot vomit then make your own redirects

right uh but even then there's there's markers uh and it's a sponsor that nobody has heard of before or it's a weird product that doesn't do this kind of marketing and you're just kind of making up your own read based on whatever you think might work again the audience is Savvy they're going to pick up on a read that is from talking points that is polished versus a read that is just somebody making something up because they want to try to sell you a vacuum cleaner cuz get the best Commission on that vacuum cleaner approach it as if it's something worth researching mhm uh look for The Logical Next Step component I don't like affiliate marketing because it is

infinitely beneficial to the company with the product but it can be infinitely beneficial to the Creator as well yeah there's some definitely over here and a little bit of maybe over here it's definitely good for them and it's maybe good for you and that imbalance I don't like so I guess there's there like a context here that I kind of want to get to which is like is using an affiliate relationship purely as a way to kind of gauge like how many conversions can you get in order to bring data to sponsors you're pitching on prepaid sponsorships is that worth doing in a similar way to using patreon because you can literally see like earnings per click you can see

conversions like in the affiliate world you know for all its faults one thing you do get is very transparent data so if your goal is or if your scenario here is before you go and talk to sponsors you want to collect data so you go and informed I don't think this is good information I think you don't think it's good information I think there's too many variables here okay and you're going to end up either uh under or overperforming for any of a hundred reasons beyond your control or understanding at this stage and you're going to go to sponsor with maybe good maybe bad data that may or may not be worse than just going in with a madeup number I guess that could make sense cuz

like you could have one piece of content that performs incredibly well for an affiliate you match well and you go to the General sponsors like audible or billion or skillshare and you're like hey I to pull an example of my own blog like I have got this blog post that made a million dollars on Affiliates can you give me a million dollars like No And there's just so many factors there's so many variables over here that influencer marketing person over here is not going

to their world doesn't look like this so while this might be numbers for product purchase and those influencers saying this the campaign is built differently the landing page would be built differently uh the relationship overall is just a different structure so when you come over here you may have just set yourself up to misunderstand how this relationship is going to work if you can't get this to happen at all and you want something and you're trying to get a sense of whether or not you could move you and do anything interesting or if you are a good sales Channel and these people aren't talking to you yet no matter how hard you try maybe but I would argue based on the Creator inboxes

I've seen it is really hard to be a Creator who's getting any numbers at all who is not getting flooded with sponsors wanting to talk to you I would agree with that so my concern the reason I'm I push back on uh affiliate deals is because there are so many sponsors hungry for creators and while you might learn something anyone's guess as to whether what you're learning is helping or hurting okay that makes sense like this is a world where I have a lot of experience and do make a lot of money on Affiliates but I think that there's I think that there's Merit to the fact that you could definitely misinterpret data from this side and try to just cart blanch apply it to this side well your

affiliate data history is from uh websit initially and then when you do it on YouTube stuff uh it's a companion to everything else you're doing so you are a much more sophisticated animal than somebody who's just starting out as a Creator your risk reward system is different your level of knowledge and engagement are different and your level of relationship with different parties along the chain is different so the assumption that somebody coming in fresh uh still green having your level of sophistication and understanding I wouldn't give them the same advice I'd give you that's true I did do Affiliates for about five years before I ever took a sponsorship on YouTube so it's and two

years of nothing before that so seven years of learning a lot before ever getting into this world and then once I got into this world like we mentioned earlier we started with a rate that was like five times lower than where I ended up so maybe it's not as useful for gauging that it's worth noting because I'm sure that there's someone somewhere in the comments who will say this is bad you started too low this is why this structure doesn't work or you're underselling you're telling people to undersell themselves the thing that we learned with you and the reason why I stand by it is we went in with the objective of build relationship for longevity and then the rate that we

landed on was so consistent for so long we don't know let's go back to the beginning would you have performed at 10 to 12K on spot one I don't think I would have yeah unless you're really sure of that based on everything not just I'm super swell and people love me but actual what you know now looking back would you have made that much money for the sponsor that you'd be worth this rate yeah I mean it's tough to know but I don't think so one might argue that you could have burned a bridge here MH and then become frustrated try again somewhere else and now our relationship becomes frustrated because nobody's taking the bait at this number and eventually things dissolve

and you're out there doing a uh a sponsor deal on every third or fourth video instead of on every video because when we say 10 to 12K per video that was every week it was every week and it actually goes further than that so I recorded this bit in a voice note to myself and I want to bring it up back again um so for skillshare in particular I believe they were my biggest sponsor I think so uh and to tell people like I'm saying were because I stopped doing sponsors because I started selling my own products which happened to perform a lot better you know turns out audience fit is very good when you're selling your own products logical Next Step but they were my biggest sponsor and I want

to say I made around 400k from sponsorships from skillshare through the relationship that we built with skillshare working with you I was able to make original courses on skillshare and I had a strategic thought when I went into this I was like well they put a lot more marketing effort into their Originals than they do into anything else wouldn't it be cool if I was like the face of skillshare on their homepage or something through doing that I've earned 600,000 through course sales on skillshare so literally more than I was ever paid from sponsorships came as basically passive income after making those courses and just putting them on

the platform a secondary benefit to having invested in the relationship yes that came out of the relationship I don't think it would have happened if I was just like this random guy emailing them out of the blue being like hey can you make an original course of me but we've done this for like uh I think it was at least a year at that point when I did the first one yeah it's the difference between sales and Business Development mhm there's an operational component here which is are you building to maximize Revenue in the short term or are you building to maximize Revenue in the long term that's the easy part to conceptualize what's harder to

conceptualize uh I think is the way you get to option b the way you get to long-term success to sustainability is not through number hacking it's through building a relationship here you're planting a seed and in planting this seed you don't know in the beginning what it's going to grow into MH and along the way as a YouTuber really any business you've got a couple of paths but as a YouTuber you can go from point to point mining as much as you can from each of these relationships and if you're getting returns every time you take out your Axe and mine at each of these points it might feel like you are an expert minor and that you are worth it and you will always be this

successful because you're that swell and everybody loves you and you're special and there's no one else on YouTube who could do what you do there's no cheaper version of you that they're going to eventually get there's no Army of 15-year-olds out there wanting to be you and who will eventually get there with more understanding of the Creator economy more understanding of the tools as they develop you're just going to be that great forever and you just keep mining keep Mining and if you're lucky it keeps paying out MH there are certainly people for whom that's true the other path is at each point along the way you plant a seed and the hard part

is that you don't necessarily know what those seeds are going to grow into but when you get to here and you look back at what's grown it's meaningful not everyone is going to be a Mighty Oak when you turn around but you start things start to happen then you get here and you look back and even more things start to happen and in this world it's not necessarily a straight line sometimes you Circle back and you revisit some of these points and you get to collect the fruit right or vegetables or whatever from the seeds that you've planted and then that's what bu the sustainability and when you put a dollar value on that in the earliest days of mining versus the earliest days

of Farming might look smaller yep it also might not but it might I think that too many people look at this and they think you're a sucker right because they don't understand that you're not planting seeds for Money Trees the seed that you're planting is not uh fruit that you can sell it's a relationship and this person who's here today when you Circle back this person might not be here they might be over here working for a much bigger company with a much bigger budget and you've built this relationship with them over years right and now you can do bigger cooler more interesting [__] because this person knows you and trusts you and they get

that you can deliver they understand your value and you understand theirs and frankly you understand yours mhm so when you want to go build something cool and the person who used to work here is now heading up the something division at this big Media Company you have an in those are the things that I think it's easy to miss when you're young in a career right not young in age but young in a career or young in age or both it's still a new industry and the level of sophistication is growing and that's cool but it's too easy to miss the fact that you will get much more in the long run out of farming is sustainable mining is not it's interesting to think like this

whole process of getting brand deals is actually a relationship building process that can be a lot more than just getting 10K for a video and it is like you literally make relationships you make friends you meet people there are opportunities that are going to come out of that look at our dots along the way we built a relationship with one sponsor yep I mean many but in one particular case we built a relationship with a sponsor and then we built our own little streaming service as a let's have fun and see what this turns into little side project and somewhere along the way it got far enough along that in our friendly conversations with this sponsor we said crazy idea what if we did like a

bundle thing and that they're like you know what that sounds pretty interesting let's do that let's try it let's just see what happens do you think we can make that happen on day one no do you think we go in with a pitch no this is like we're sitting around having a completely different conversation and the idea happens and that turns into a bundle deal that lasts years and now a business of ours making millions upon Millions of dollars for creators and is now one of the biggest sponsors on YouTube in its own right you think that could have happened if we hadn't gone down this path of building the relationships nebula is 100% built on relationships in

all directions including the sponsor relationships including the platform relationships if you don't plant those seeds and then go back and water them sometimes you don't get stuff like that so it's much like that graph you often see where it's like you know employment is like linear and then entrepreneurship can be like this exponential curve I think we're looking at the same thing here with what is your mindset going into building uh relationships with sponsors like you said are you farming then it might be that small in the beginning but exponential in the longterm kind of and if you're looking at as a minor you might get more in the beginning but

maybe it's that linear thing or maybe it just Peters out eventually looking at creators who I respect and admire who are like doing things on their own but you know we have conversations about numbers and I see them mining they'll they'll do the thing where they're like oh yeah I'm up here and I'm like yeah that's way better bye and uh it's not because they're dumb it's not because they're a bad person it's just they took a different approach they optimized for this part yep um and I suppose it is possible if you do things right or if you're fortunate and you get to build relationships over time you can do this and then catch that wave of

relationships and I would hope that a smart Savvy Creator the trouble is that if you get so much validation from this it's really hard to justify switching paths yep and we've we've seen that we've parted ways with creators who were very much on this trajectory and thought they always would be and then they didn't understand why they couldn't get the sponsor rates that they felt they were worth yep and that's okay I've got nothing against those people they've got nothing against their approach to building their own business that's uh they're all um doing cool stuff and I wish them the best but I don't know how to make that sustainable I don't know how to make

mining sustainable and there's also like a piece of this is a philosophy to what I want to create here that I have a very specific target audience M it's the Creator who wants to have a long career and who wants to build Partnerships MH so like if there's a Creator out there who's like I just want to get the bag as much as possible I'm not really making this for them right I don't really want to serve them if they change their mind say that up FR I probably will like there's going to be a thesis it's like you know I'm I'm making this video for creators who want to build a sustainable career as a Creator and part of that is relationships and part of that is accepting a little bit less

than maybe you could get right away to build those long-term relationships you know you can't serve everyone with what you say yeah so that's my filter Farming versus mining uh it can look like the same amount of work MH for widely different uh initial returns I have some lightning round questions for you go so and that means we're going to round up we're going to wrap up soon which is probably good um but been here for hours we've been doing this for a while uh but like I said I'm make the ultimate guide sorry what CPA CPM what do those mean and which should be look which should we be looking at uh if we're talking about AdSense CPM sure why not uh cost per

thousand views cost per Mill CPM Mill being Latin I think for thousand yep cost per thousand views uh CPA is cost per acquisition that's a sale when somebody clicks through and they sign up for the thing they have been acquired the customer relationship now belongs to the sponsor acquisition cost for acquisition that is uh they will pay you because they got paid so that's what we should really be focusing on that is what the sponsors focus on okay so I would say

that's what we should focus on all right um should I give a brand access to my analytics or screenshots and demographic info when they ask for it uh yes if they are yes only if they are willing to share information with you okay TI for Tat on that and only share the information for the video they sponsor okay you can share Channel my Graphics like if they say like yeah we'll share data with you and they ask for stuff up front like feel free okay like you're You're Building trust and that's not keys to the kingdom data um sometimes that'll be table stakes and sometimes when you're pushing on how important data is showing a little bit is not the worst way to get the conversation

moving okay but like don't if they sponsor a video but won't give you any data then like what they yeah right uh should you ask to be paid upfront should you ask for a deposit or just wait for them to pay you at the end and how soon should they pay you should have a contract with payment terms okay and they should pay you when they say they're going to pay you paying after is normal that's customary it's very rare for a sponsor to pay before it publishes for a bunch of reasons um in terms of accounting I believe you have to book the sale uh when you publish the video so if you publish in June but you don't get paid until August that's a June well that depends if you're doing a

cruel versus cash that's the whole thing but uh we usually get it's like net 30 to you well the reason I go down that path is sponsors will invariably be on a cruel base not on cash so they don't care they will pay you as soon as you invoice but it has to go through their uh accounts payable system which uh if there's like a net 30 or net 60 it's not because they're trying to hang on to the money to screw you it's because that's just how their system works so make sure you understand what their payment terms are and then like you know if you have to send a polite letter and then a less polite letter um and then round three is you CC a lawyer yeah I've never we've never

had a sponsor not pay us by lawyer round ad placement we kind of covered this but pre-roll mid roll always end always the end logical Next Step how about quick mention in the early part of the video uh sure which is great for disclosure for FTC requirements by saying like blah in this video I'm going to something uh this video brought to you by the concept of diapers blah um and then at the end you talk about how great the diapers are uh if that's a good fit for your video um cool yeah like letting the audience know that this is coming uh and that this is the sponsor and that's context that might be interesting for them um they just like planting the seed

in their head I do that with videos where I'm going to pitch my templates I'll be like you know if you want a done for you productivity system I have it more on that later back into the video we do a lot for nebula spots mostly because the Creator can say like if you want to watch this video add free here the nebula link is in the description or whatever because there's an actual value ad again logical next step when you hear that you be like oh click I want to see this that ads or whatever um right but generally like a quick mention of the sponsor it happens so quickly it's not even worth skipping it's fine I think that's and that's also a context dependent thing I remember

watching a real life lore video where in the beginning he's like hey I have a fulllength companion to this video like that's the kind of thing that's great to mention because now the entire video that the uh viewer is going to watch is almost an ad for the companion on nebula but if it's like hey let me just do a 60-second ad for diapers or away suitcases or whatever it is that just blocks people from watching the video so it's like it's different context yeah uh okay um when you're writing up your contract how many revisions or like what sort of language should you put in there regarding revisions to your spots I put a time limit on it more than number of revisions uh humans only have

the ability to send you so many revisions in two business days M we've never had like our contracts say two business days so it's just we submit within two business days they have to approve or ask for mhm and you have basically two business days to figure it out right because the thing that's not quite stated there but is implied and it all like functionally it works out fine um but you have two business days in which to make revisions we are not the Creator is not required to do a 100 rounds of revisions and it takes them as long as it takes them right so you send back notes on the first round the Creator implements those notes we're done right

yeah and I guess I would add to that uh when you're getting a brand deal make sure that they send you a document with the talking points that way you can say I followed your talking points here they are yeah um a big part of why you want the approval process is so that they can't come back and say you didn't do this we're not going to pay you the approval is there more for you than for them they think it's for them but it's more a mechanism for you to say you approve this which we've actually had that happen we had a sponsor uh come back and say like the boss came in and said we don't like this isn't okay they shouldn't have done this and we're like your people approved it's like they

shouldn't have and I'm like sucks for you this has happened with me or like the talking points it wasn't like I did a thing that was bad for the brand but it was like the talking points had mentioned a certain sale they were doing I said the sale two weeks later they come back like we weren't running that sale you should have got me new talking points send me the accurate talking points the instructions uh and while I'm thinking about that um I will give a tip when the sponsor gives you your link go to the link and make sure not only that it goes to the right page check the URL because I have had multiple times where a sponsor has given me another Creator's link that goes to

the same landing page and all of the conversions would have been attributed to that Creator I've had other times where they'll send me one of my old links well you'll see like uh campaign equals Thomas Frank and period equals no November 2020 and it's 2022 and I'm like cool so that's that's just a really old link and I'm going to get no you know your data is going to get all messed up at the very uh least so just make sure you check your UTM parameters on there I think you mentioned that our contract doesn't have terms on how long content has to stay up is that something like as long as it's not in the contract there is no term or should you specify I wouldn't okay it's pretty uncommon for

that to even come up now people expect that YouTube videos are going to stay up if you're going in after a month and using the YouTube Editor to cut out the ad reads that's a real dick move and people are going to catch on because like while the bulk of your conversions are going to come in within the first 72 hours and then one week then one month Etc after a month you're still getting conversions especially if you run the same sponsor repeatedly over a period of

time all of those old videos are still stacking conversions in your favor today if you cut go back and cut them all out your today performance will be weaker so you're just like weakening the overall relationship so one kind of a dick move you shouldn't do that two it'll hurt your numbers last question this is the most fun one how do you make more money from your sponsorships how you raise your rates build a better relationship with your audience okay the only way your sponsor rate goes up is if the audience is doing more to signal to the sponsor that it's working the only way you're going to get that is by getting a larger audience and a larger group of people within that

audience who will follow through and sign up that can be better titles better thumbnails better storytelling tighter editing in the first 30 seconds of the video you should be doing all of those things anyway um a lot of it is making sure that when you run a sponsor you're running a sponsor that speaks well of how you see the audience when you hold up that mirror the person in the audience should feel like you see them as a smart and intelligent attractive person who is capable of doing amazing things and um isn't going to fall for dumb scams right like if you're out there selling people nfts then your audience is probably going to take you less seriously you want to build a

relationship you want to build your audience and then build your relationship with your audience that's how you get more sponsor dollars how about some of the Tactical things let me rephrase it this way uh assuming you know I've done all this like I'm picking the right sponsor I've built a great relationship with my audience what are some of the mistakes that we see creators make that either you know encourage viewers to not watch the ad or don't pitch the brand well enough yeah uh giant gaps never leave a big Blank Spot before the sponsor read and never ever say thanks for watching that is uh it's what we call permission to leave when you say

thanks for watching really glad for blah uh thanks so much to my patreon supporters for making this video possible and now I want to tell you about this video sponsor by the time you're done saying thanks the audience is gone right they know that they can leave now and they do MH not because they're jerks or because they want to bail on you and you're not tricking them into staying by not doing that but when you say thanks for watching that's the end the credits have rolled get up and leave nobody's being a jerk here just the lights came on and the credits are rolling it's time to get up and go and you can roll the credits you say well you should stay

look at like the craft Services people they're really nice so you should see their names and uh sure you should but like people don't so when you get permission to leave people leave if you give people a good reason to stay connecting the value of the sponsor to whatever you're talking about logical Next Step um then you make it part of the content the difference between an AdSense ad and a sponsor read should not be one has your face the other doesn't the difference should be some connection to whatever the hell it is you're talking about that doesn't mean you should fully integrate the ad into the video every time but when you are on camera saying this or it's your voice

your persona even if you're getting paid to do it you're still doing it this is part of your video it needs to be part of your video that's the reason it works so if you're making it an other thing then the audience will see it as other thing right and they will bail because that's they're here for the video this is other thing make it part of the video one thing that I'll add to that is I try to follow the Ada framework when I'm writing an ad so it's like get their attention build the interest build desire enough for them to go take action and I want to mention that because definitely what you said like make a part of the video but some creators will interpret that as well I should write a

fun song about the sponsor or like I've seen Jimmy a couple times like uh few years ago do sponsorships where it's like the brand barely is the focus of the ad read it's like here's more of the video and by the way like this is sponsored by this and he's gotten much better at that over the years I think like if you're going to do a sponsor read you have to make people care about the sponsor and you do that by keeping their attention but then getting them interested in something they care about and tying the brand or the product to that interest which in gender desire and that gets them to go actually click and convert yeah uh you want to you make clicking on the sponsor link

interesting enough that even if I don't do it I understand why I would right I would also say before you mention the name of the sponsor I the audience should understand the value of the sponsor if you say I'd like to thank skillshare for sponsoring this video skillshare is an online blah me yeah it doesn't perform very well if you go in with like uh yeah these are the 20 best ways to what was my example earlier these are the 20 best ways to uh the 20 tips for creating videos as a side hustle to earn money and like when I got started doing this I did all of my own editing like there's a lot of work here but it doesn't there's plenty of great tools out there that can help you along

that Journey you don't even have to like you don't necessarily have to go to a fancy video editing school I didn't I learned how to edit video by watching tutorial videos like the ones you would see on skillshare so by the time you land on the word skillshare I already get it I already know why I want this or even better this editing course like I literally took Ali's Final Cut Pro editing course or something like that yeah being able to say being able to place the value before the name the audience will at least respect that there is a purpose to it they understand the purpose for this sponsor being a part of this video when you say and I'd like to think they're never going to get

to the purpose they just know sponsor and again the audience is Savvy they know some creators will like do uh when they start the segue they'll change the music underneath so like little psychological cues to let the audience know that the thing I did that right uh and that's fine that's all healthy it's not you're not tricking somebody you're making a point by connecting two things yep in fact I did the music change uh specifically to kind of indicate like this is the sponsor segment cuz I always wanted to make sure like the content of the video is useful on its own it does not depend on the sponsor even if the sponsor happens to be a great fit for what I was talking about I think maybe

some of that was like me just being overly cautious and I would rather be overly cautious than tarnish my relationship with the audience of course and that's part of the um philosophical and ethical promise to the audience that builds the trust you're not tricking them you're not saying like a thing you want thing you want haha I tricked you into seeing a commercial right that's toxic that poisons the relationship what you want is a fair and Equitable exchange of you're still paying attention you knew there was going to be a sponsor in this video yep that's you got this video for free it's in the description probably mentioned up front right like you knew

this was coming what I'm doing is I'm ensuring that when we get there you're not wondering how this has anything to do with anything by the time we get there uh it's like the marshmallow man at the end of Ghostbusters like if you put that in the first 10 minutes of the movie it seems silly right but you start out with skepticism and there's a stack of books what's going on and it slowly builds and by the end you get to marshmallow man it's like oh yeah sure that makes

sense uh you should treat your sponsor reads the same way treat your sponsor reads as marshmallow man yeah by the time you get to the word the name of the sponsor it should be like okay I get it I understand why that's there then nobody's thinking like oh you jerk you tricked me in fact the opposite is true there was a period of time there when the smooth segue thing was still new where the audience regarded it like a magic trick like there's the reveal like oh you got me I didn't even see that oh that's so good yep like this is the smoothest segue I've ever seen they always misspell segue s g w a y yes they do uh but yeah they like the audience is Savvy they're smart they

understand how this whole machine works and they want you to succeed that's the whole point of the parasocial relationship is that they feel like they know you they feel like they're on this journey with you they don't want you to die of starvation and not make videos anymore they want you to be wellfed and successful and happy so you keep making the videos that they love so much and they know if they're not paying money then ads are part of the deal right and I suppose we should emphasize that we have six at least years of plentiful data to show that this is true and this creates sustainable careers so you will inevitably get one or two people in the comments that are like ah whatever I

don't like the segue it was too smooth or something like that or they'll be like oh there's an ad in this I hate you some people are just going to complain yeah that's like I don't know that's having to clean the bathroom it's part of it's part of your job you're going to have some people who go into your bathroom and mess it up uh but you still get to run your business and you get to grow it yeah you can try to make everyone happy all of the time and you're going to be very frustrated because it's impossible and you will have sacrificed every opportunity you had to thrive right okay I will finally let you go oh my God if people want to follow you it's like 800 p.m. you don't need

coffee if people want to follow you if people want to see we started at 5: where should they go uh all right well I'll just tell them go watch the NDA podcast on nebula if you're on nebula I'm uh if you look me up on uh nebula it's it's NDA is the name of my show where it's kind of like this but um I talk a little less uh or there's um my YouTube channel you can look me up by name Twitter at dsus um that's probably good enough cool all right y'all see you later sign up for nebula one last little bit of promo for you if you want to learn how to actually run your creator business then you may want to follow up this conversation by going and taking my

class over on nebula called business 101 for creators this is a class that will teach you how to structure your creator business whether to choose an LLC or different business structure how to deal with business expenses and taxes how to get organized and build processes and even how to start hiring people to scale your business this class is taught by you guessed it me and pulls from my over 12 years of running this Creator business full-time it's an hour of

content there are a ton of useful tips in there if you are a Creator trying to scale your business and you can watch it right now over on nebula using my special link in the description down below which will get you nebula access for just $2.50 per month a 40% discount over the normal price and as far as streaming services go a pretty darn good deal if I do say so myself with nebula access you're also going to get access to my new videos from this channel a week early and without ads you'll get tons of other exclusive content from lots of other great creators and you'll be helping to support not only my work but the work of independent creators in general nebula is a Creator run and

creator-owned streaming service it is the largest of its kind we are working to redefine what it means for independent creators to build something truly amazing and you are really going to want to stick around for some of the stuff we have coming down the pipeline in 2024 so sign up with that link in the description down below if you do thank you so much for your support and even if you don't thank you for sticking around to the end of this video I know it is a fantastically long video so thank you for watching it hopefully you found it useful and I'll see you in my next