How to Price YouTube Sponsorships and Brand Deals? (BrandConnect Program Guide)

Getting good brand deals and sponserships can help grow your YouTube channel and business. But it's important to value your work properly and know what you deserve. An important step is setting the right minimum price for opportunities on platforms like YouTube's BrandConnect program.

Your minimum prices will attract good brands while protecting yourself as a creator. Setting the price too low can weaken your brand and make your expertise seem less valuable. But pricing too high may mean missing out on chances at first. You need to find prices that suit your goals and experience.

This guide can help you set the minimum price for BrandConnect deals. It talks about things to think about like how strong your brand already is, the long-term value of the content you create, and what you lose by working with one brand instead of promoting your own offers or affiliates. 

Tips include starting by seeing initial offers, then raising prices up or keeping them based on what feels right for your channel and audience. The goal is finding prices that are fair for both sides, letting you reach more people while getting proper pay.

By learning pricing strategies from top creators, you can use brand partnership opportunities on YouTube and other sites to further grow your influence and business over time. Let's look at some good practices for deciding your minimums.

Setting Correct Pricing in YouTube BrandConnect

Okay, now let’s talk about pricing. As you’re setting up your account, you’re gonna have the option to add minimum pricing.

To be transparent, my minimum in this system is gonna be $10,000 and $2,000. The reason for that pricing in my case is because I’ve been making videos for nine years and I’ve done a lot of brand deals, I’ve done a lot of affiliate marketing, and I deeply understand the long-term value that a video can have on YouTube.

Video content is extremely powerful for driving sales and bringing awareness to things that people otherwise wouldn’t know that much about. 

Now, once you connect your account, I’m gonna show you how to do that and give you some other information about your media kit here in just a second. It’s important to note that there is a box that pops up and it gives you information on your minimum pricing, and it also tells you this.

BrandConnect deals include six month content usage on YouTube and other platforms. So all that stuff I was saying before about the music that you’re using and things like that and adding additional money.

This is because the content licensing, all of those things are really important in this scenario because if they can take your content and they can use it in whatever the way they want essentially for six months.

Then one, they’re getting a heck of a deal because they don’t have to pay somebody to make the content. I mean, not any real money anyway, not a production house to make it. But it puts you at risk if you don’t have those commercial licensing.

Because if you hand it off to them and then they have problems because of it, guess who that’s gonna ripple back down to? You guessed it, you. 

So again, be careful about the assets that you’re using when it comes to the content that you’re putting together for BrandConnect.

Now if you look farther down in that box, they are asking for your minimums, but it’s optional. So if you have no idea where to start, start with it blank and then see what brands are gonna offer you and then decide on if that’s too little or too high and then make your adjustments from there on your minimums, or you can set it in advance for what you feel it’s worth to make a dedicated video or a short on your channel.

The reason it’s important to make sure that you’re just thinking about what it’s worth for you to make it is because if you look at my example of me doing a $10,00 on a long form video, some people are gonna look at that and they’re gonna be like, “Oh my gosh, how’s he charging so much?”

Other people are gonna look at that and say, “Oh my gosh, Shri’s crazy. Why is he letting it go for such a small price?” But for me, that’s fine for one video for a company that I might not ever work with again.

However, if you do decide to set it in advance, I just encourage you to consider these things in your pricing. 

First, it’s important to know just in case you don’t, that you can promote products that you think are a good fit for your audience using affiliate marketing and make money on those videos for years to come.

In some cases, those videos will drive you a lot more revenue long term compared to the amount of money that you would get on a brand deal video now. I have a video explaining this concept in detail. I’ll link it to the top of the screen.

But if you already promote things on your channel, either affiliate products or your own products or your driving people into like crowdfunding or something like that, then there’s also an opportunity cost for every video that you publish for someone else, and therefore that should also be considered into your pricing.

When pricing, you also wanna consider the strength of your brand if you have one. And if you’re still building up and you don’t have a strong brand yet, that’s perfectly fine, but this information is important for you, for your future.

Because brand deals are not always about click the link conversions. In some cases, it’s about association or awareness. And if you have a strong brand around your channel, your recommendations carry weight. The association of you using and/or recommending a product also carries a lot of weight.

For example, if you’ve been watching my videos for any amount of time and I’ve recommended something to you, you’ve already found out how good those things are, because of that, next time that I recommend something, you’re more likely to take my recommendation because you know that I recommend good stuff.

It might not be in that moment that you click the link, but let’s say that down the road, if you’re not already live streaming, you decide to start live streaming. In that particular case, you know that I use and recommend StreamYard.

Because of that, if you decide to start live streaming because you get that awareness from me and interacting with my content. If you decide to start live streaming, there’s a good chance that you’re gonna go to their website and check it out and see if it’s a good fit for what you’re trying to do.

As I’m sure you can imagine, these associations over time can be very powerful and valuable to the brands. The next thing to consider when pricing is what’s it worth to you? This is an important thing to consider.

Because for some content creators, being able to add an extra 2to what it is that you’re doing is a big deal and would make a significant impact on your life. And for some of you YouTube ballers out there, you might not even notice if an extra $1,went into your account until it came time to do your accounting for the month.

That’s why it’s important to think about what it’s worth to you, regardless of all of the things about what you should do. 

But if you wanna squeeze everything you can out of this opportunity that we have as being content creators, leave it blank, see what brands will offer you, and then start figuring it out from there because that’s a great starting point.

They’re going to tell you exactly what it is that they think what you’re doing is worth with a little bit of a discount attached because of course they’re trying to win in that situation. But once they offer you the deal, you could accept it and just do the thing.

Or you could use that as information and not do the deal, but then start adding that type of information to your minimum pricing. 

Just remember to make sure that everything that you are promoting is a good fit for the people that you’re reaching with your content so that they can get the most out of it, the brand can get the most out of it, and then you can get the most out of it, and hopefully get to work with those brands again.

And regardless of the approach you’re gonna take, remember the videos that you do with brand deals attached to them, they’re gonna live on YouTube for a really long time. This video here was published in 2014 and still gained an extra 3.6k views over the last 365 days eight years later.

So if you’re new to all of this, please don’t discount the long-term value of what it is that you’re creating or yourself as a creator. 

Because as your channel grows, you’re also gonna bring a lot more attention to these videos as well over time.