How to Start Partnering and Collaborating with Brands on YouTube

There comes a moment in every YouTube creator’s journey when it’s time to climb the big looming mountain in front of you. 

Once you’ve established a YouTube presence for yourself, chosen your niche, gotten a nice collection of videos under your belt, and built up a steady stream of viewers and subscribers, it’s time to start thinking about the next step. It’s time to make some money!

Tapping into YouTube’s ad revenue program is a natural place to start to monetize your YouTube channel. But don’t overlook or underestimate one of the most important ways that YouTube creators and influencers bring in real earnings: partnering and/or collaborating with a brand. 

If you’re new to the partnership arena, you may be wondering how and when you should get started. We’ve got all the answers for you, below!

1. What Is a Brand Partnership, and What Kinds of Partnerships Are There?

A brand partnership is an arrangement between a YouTube creator and a business in which the creator agrees to play a role in promoting the business in exchange for a monetary or other form of payment.

Partnering and collaborating with a brand can take many forms — from a quick product placement to a full-on sponsorship deal and everything in between. Three popular forms include:

• Sponsorships are similar to how an athlete might get sponsored by a brand — your partnership may include you wearing or displaying their logo in all your content, for example. 
• Branded content is a partnership where you will collaborate with the brand to create content centered around their product/service — like a tutorial on their product or an unboxing. 
• Brand integrations are when the brand will ask you to feature a product or service — like a product placement, for example — in a way that aligns with your own particular brand and style. 

2. Why Should You Want a Partnership? (What’s in It for You?)

Partnering with a brand comes with plenty of benefits for YouTube creators, including:  

• Money! Obviously, the first benefit is financial! Brands will pay you either an arranged fee or a commission (or both). It’s a way to supplement the revenue you get from your ad sales, which can be unreliable. Sponsorships from brands can often earn you far more than ads alone. (It’s how the mega-influencers out there are making most of their millions.)
• Cool free stuff!  Depending on your partnership, you might get products or services for free in order to promote them. For example, beauty influencers that partner with cosmetic companies may get all the mascara they could ever dream of for free, in exchange for their promotion services. 
• Influence! The more successfully you partner with brands, the more of an influencer you become. Your opinions and point-of-view will influence your audience to make decisions, like what to buy or where to go. You can turn this kind of influence into future career opportunities as well. 

3. Why Would a Brand Want to Partner With You?

Brands love partnering with YouTube creators because it’s a way to reach their customers in a more authentic way than straight-up advertisements. 

While you as the creator benefit from the payment arrangement, the brand benefits from your relationship with your audience — especially because your audience trusts you. A recommendation from someone they trust or an association with someone they admire means consumers are much more likely to buy something from a brand. 

But what if you don’t have a huge following or massive numbers of views yet? Why would a brand be interested in a partnership? How many subscribers do you need?

The awesome thing is that you don’t have to be a YouTube superstar with millions of views to form a partnership with a brand. 

All you really need is a steady loyal following in a good niche. Your audience might be small but it might also be the exact target audience that a brand wants to reach. This is especially the case if you’re in a low-competition niche in a profitable market. 

As evidence of the value of a loyal fanbase,

brands often factor in engagement rates (i.e., likes, comments, shares, saves, etc.) even more than numbers of views when choosing to form a partnership with a creator.

If you’re engaging your audience and they keep coming back to view more of your videos, those audience members are more likely to be paying attention and receptive to any brands you promote through your channel. That means higher sales for the brand.

Finally, brands can often spend less on sponsoring a creator than if they purchased ads through YouTube (since YouTube charges brands a hefty fee for each ad they run). A partnership with a creator often leads to a greater return on investment for a savvy brand. That’s a win for them, and a win for you!

4. What Are the Potential Downsides to Forming a Brand Partnership?

Go looking for advice on this topic and you’re bound to find people eager to tell you that the only downside to partnering is the work you have to do to find a partner. Sure enough, it can be a long, hard slog, requiring a lot of legwork to go out and convince someone that you’re the right person to promote their brand.

Unless you get really lucky, you’ll have to break out that business school acumen, fire up the spreadsheets, and get very good at selling yourself. We’re talking market research, cold-calling, presentations (if you can even get that far) — and all this after you’ve actually built your brand into something ready for a commercial market.

Always keep in mind that brand-creator partnerships are a medium that thrives on authenticity.

People sometimes get cynical about it, and talk about “manufactured authenticity.” But honestly, that never really gets you very far. Be your real self, and the people will come.

So, where does this leave us on other possible downsides to bringing on a sponsor? Well, you need to make sure they’re the right brand for your brand. You find the right pairing, and your audience will stick with you. But start partnering with anyone with an open checkbook willy nilly, and you could hurt your image. Don’t overdo it. If all of your videos are featuring various brands, you’ll start to seem more like a commercial than a real person — and you’ll lose trust and interest from your audience in the process. 

Moreover, depending on the details of your partnership, you’ll be entering into a contract that is going to limit your control over your own content to some degree. Usually this isn’t going to be overly burdensome. Maybe the brand wants you to watch your language or avoid certain hot-button issues. Maybe they want you to maintain a certain posting schedule. A good partner will appreciate that we’re in an era of new media, and the best thing for them to do is get out of the way and let you do what you do best. But you still have to convince them, you still have to work with them and deal with any asks they might throw at you, and you need to make sure you don’t alienate your audience in the process.

That said, don’t be over-cautious. Just make the partnership work with your existing brand. Find an angle to make the sale fun and in keeping with your existing content. Think of it as a new creative challenge. Who knows, do them well enough, and the brand-promotions might become a valued part of your channel.

5. How Do You Find and Choose a Brand to Partner with You?

The demand for influencer marketing is booming, and there are more and more brands out there looking for the right creators to partner with. But how do you find one of them, and how do you know they’re the right one for you?

You’ve got a few options for how to find and choose a brand to form a partnership with: 

• Search the marketplaces/sponsorship platforms. Partnerships are so common now that there are now marketplaces where brands looking for influencers post a version of a “want ad,” and YouTube creators can submit their channel and apply for consideration. Although YouTube recently discontinued its own sponsorship platform FameBit, it is in the process of launching YouTube BrandConnect as a replacement. In the meantime, you can check out alternatives like Grapevine, Tap Influence, CreatorIQ, and more. A note of warning: Don’t just sign up with any brand you can find that will have you. It’s worth it to be choosy. Only partner with brands you think that you and your audience can connect with. 
• Research and reach out to brands proactively. Roll up your sleeves and get old school — find brands that you think would be a good fit for your channel and reach out to them. Search for brands within your niche; look at brands that are working with similar channels to yours in terms of size and content; ask your network. Remember that just like applying for a job, what you say when you reach out to a brand can make or break you. Check out YouTube’s excellent advice for successfully pitching yourself to brands to start. 
• Ask your audience. Especially if you’re a smaller channel with a loyal and engaged fanbase, your audience may have some helpful ideas too. Ask them what they think about your potential partnerships, or what types of products or services they might be interested in learning about, or what kinds of videos they’d like to see. Don’t assume your audience will or won’t like something — they may have suggestions or requests that could surprise and inspire you.
• Let them come to you. Eventually, as you gain influence and a following in your niche, you’ll start having brands reach out directly to you, too. Make sure you do your research for these brands, too, and choose with your audience’s best interests at heart. (In the long run, keeping and growing your audience is what benefits you the most.) 

6. Do You Need to Tell Your Audience About Your Partnership?

Yep, it’s common that either the brand or your jurisdiction (i.e., where you live) will require that you disclose a partnership that benefits you financially (including receiving a product/service for free, even if you aren’t paid otherwise). 

This could take the form of a disclaimer or other message. The requirements vary, so make sure you read YouTube’s guidance on it and check with your brand for their policies as well. If you don’t follow YouTube’s policies, your videos could be removed — and you could lose your partnership agreement in the process. 

7. How Much Money Can You Earn through a Brand Partnership on YouTube?

That’s going to depend! We wish we could give you a concrete answer, but it’s going to vary based on the size of your channel, the brand itself, the market, the type of content you’re creating, and more. (Some sources say $20-$30 per 1,000 views is one starting negotiation price point, but that’s not entirely reliable.) 

But here are a few things to keep in mind when you do start negotiating payments with a brand:

• Decide on a payment arrangement. Your arrangement could be based on a cost per view (CPV) or cost per thousand views (RPM) — which means you earn a set amount for certain number of views of your sponsored video — i.e, the more views, the more money you get. Or you could get a flat rate (one payment regardless of the performance of the video), or set up an exchange (i.e., creating content to get a free product or service). 
• Make sure it’s actually worth it for you. How much will it cost you (in your time as well as in equipment, etc) to create the content that a brand wants from you? Will you earn enough from the partnership to make a profit rate that works for you?

We’ve scratched the surface here when it comes to beginning a partnership with a brand on YouTube. Now it’s up to you to get started — good luck! 

TL;DR:

There are a lot of factors to keep in mind when starting to partner and collaborate with brands, and it can take a lot of hard work and involve some content tradeoffs. But if you manage it well, choose the right brands that complement your own brand, keep your content centered on your audience, and negotiate profitable rates, you can grow your channel and your bank account at the same time. The sky’s the limit! 

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