So you are a YouTuber, you’ve been pumping out solid content for who knows how long now, and you have about 100,000 or more subscribers with decent viewer numbers in all videos. All in all, things are starting to pay off. By this point, you probably have companies scouting you and offering you money to promote their brand in one of your videos. Aside from the obvious of whether or not you are interested in the brand, you need to see whether your possible partnership is valuable in the first place. Let’s start by looking at two things that companies typically offer:
- Pay-Per-Video: They pay you a set fee in return for a sponsored video.
- Affiliate Program: They give you an affiliate link to promote on your video and you get paid per conversion when your visitors go through their site — some companies will even offer both options at the same time.
Now, this is the most important part, you need to figure out if their target demographic aligns with yours. This is not only important for you as an artist, but also important to your potential partner, as a business, because they need to make sure your audience is or close to their target demographic.As a new media artist, you already have a variety of sources to analyze the audience demographic that comes to your media channels. Both YouTube and Facebook will provide these analytics for your channel and fan page already. But what about the companies? The main tool I use is Quantcast, this site allows you to enter a web address and receive relative data on the demographic as well a the types of visitors that frequent the site. Let’s take KevJumba for example, since we don’t have access to his YouTube analytics, we will take data from Quantcast off his website KevJumba.com. This is the data we get:
Now hypothetically speaking, let’s say Sprint were to approach KevJumba on doing a possible sponsored video. Lets take a look at demographic data from Sprint.com:
As you can see from the screen shots above, a good amount of audience data from both brands align with each other. Judging by these numbers, it would be a good idea to further explore the possibility of partnership, if this scenario were to happen.
In regards to rates, it may be wise to charge more as an artist if your audience data is a match with the potential partner because you are essentially driving more targeted traffic to their brand (generally, more targeted traffic = higher conversion rates). This data is also beneficial for the artist, as it helps ensure that he or she keeps a consistent image.
[…] What I want you to do now is go to your own analytics dashboard and write down all the details you see. Now take what you’ve written down and compare that demographic to potential advertisers using Quantcast. You’ve probably heard me mention Quantcast many times in my last articles, and that’s because it is an extremely valuable tool that can earn you great income if utilized correctly. Quantcast allows you to type in a specific website and receive data on the main demographics that visit that site. This makes pitching your site to potential advertisers much easier. Remember: would an advertiser rather have 100,000 hits from random people to their site or would they rather have 30,000 hits from people guaranteed to be interested in their product? For more info, check out my article on measuring the value of your YouTube channel. […]
[…] 2. Find a company with the same target demographic: This is outlined in our previous post about how to analyze value of brand partnerships using Quantcast. Quantcast is a great resource to find the relative audience demographic for a specific site. […]