I started working on this idea around 8 months ago when I realized there was a gap in the market for a comprehensive tool to manage YouTube sponsorships.
For some context, there are 7 main strategies that YouTubers use to monetize their audience:youtube-monetization.webp114 KB
Affiliation by promoting other people's products with Amazon for example
Physical products like merch or creator-led brands with Shopify
And of course, sponsorships.
But when looking at the landscape of tools around YouTube channel monetization and talking to some YouTuber friends, I realized that there isn't really a go-to solution to manage sponsorships for brands, creators, and agencies.
In 2019, I was an intern at a startup and I got to manage YouTube influencer campaigns, here are some of the tasks I did manually:
Research dozens of creators manually
Rate their channel engagement
Analyze their audience to see if it was a good fit for our brand
Contact all creators who seem like good fits for our brand
Communicate with the agents and creators
Thanks to this experience, I got to see the whole process from the brand side and saw how creators and agents from channels with around 500k subscribers or more were handling sponsorships.
I noticed a few issues though:
Creators had a hard time presenting their channel stats in a way that helped them negotiate good deals
The media kits creators or agents provided were often PDFs updated by hand
Tracking solutions were pretty clunky
Different brands have different goals with sponsorships, which is not always clear to the creator
There was a lack of transparency between brand and creators, which led both parties to have their guards up
In the last years I became friends with creators who get sponsored by brands, and I've heard some horror stories from their side as well, and the problems listed above seem to still not have improved that much, even 5 years later!
The sponsorship space needs better tools, and I think that I can help!
Behind the scenes ⚙️
I made a video to document how the first year of this project!
Introducing Sponsorship.so ✨
Sponsorship is a platform designed to make it easier for brands and creators to find each other and collaborate on sponsorships.
For now, I started with the creation of a big database containing which brands are mentioned on YouTube by creators and I analyzed more than 2 million videos so far!
In the future, I plan to add even more features to help you ace your next sponsorships. For example better tools for tracking and analyzing your campaigns, solutions for safely handling sensitive information like payment details, or even the ability to create real-time media kits.
I've also worked on a software product for creators called SchoolMaker, so I'm already used to building tools in the creator space.
If you're interested in learning more about how Sponsorship can help you grow your channel or find new partners, I'd love to chat! Reach out and let's discuss how we can work together to make the sponsorship space a better place.
Alex 👊
Alexandru Golovatenco
Hi, I'm Alex. I write articles about YouTube sponsorships for brands, content creators, and agencies. I also created sponsorship.so, which is a tool that helps you find the right fit for a YouTube sponsorship.
