If you’re a YouTuber wondering how much you should charge for YouTube partnerships, this blog post is for you!
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Welcome back to my series that breaks down how much you can actually get paid as a content creator. Today we’re talking about YouTube partnerships. More specifically, I am going to help you know when to start charging, and what to charge, plus I’ll be sharing a formula to help you get paid on YouTube.
There are 27 million paid creators in the United States alone. The global influencer market is valued at $21.1 billion, but you’re telling me that we haven’t figured out a way to standardize how much creators are paid.
This series is going to change that.
How Much to Charge for YouTube Partnerships
In the first post in this series, I talked about how much you should charge for Instagram collaborations. We covered what I’m currently charging and I shared a formula that all creators can start using to get paid. You can learn that formula here.
Today we’re talking about how much you can charge for a YouTube partnership. In future posts, I’ll break down how much to charge for TikTok collaborations and YouTube Shorts.
Here is the breakdown of what we’re going to be covering today:
- When to start charging for brand deals on YouTube
- The 4 main types of partnerships brands are after on YouTube
- A formula to help you calculate your rates
- How much I currently charge for brand deals on YouTube
First things first, let’s talk about industry standards. In my book, the industry standard is that creators should always be paid for their work and influence! It’s time to change that narrative.
When can you start charging for YouTube Partnerships?
As with Instagram collaborations, we’re setting a new industry standard for YouTube partnerships. And that’s getting paid. You deserve to be paid for your work, your platform, the time you’ve spent building trust, and the gear you’ve bought.
There is so much that goes into every YouTube video that you create, and you deserve to be paid for that work.
And yes, I’m saying all Creators, no matter where you’re at, can get paid!
Of course, if you have no experience, you can absolutely do free partnerships to build your portfolio. But if you’re reading this, and you feel like you should be getting paid… then you’re ready to be paid.
The 4 main types of partnerships on YouTube
There are four types of partnerships that brands typically look for on YouTube.
- Mentions – a “shoutout” style partnership, where you talk about the brand for anywhere from 30-60 seconds.
- Integrations – a longer “shoutout” style partnership where you talk about the brand for anywhere from 90 seconds to 2 minutes. The integration should be relevant to the video and talking about the brand should feel more natural to the viewer.
- Dedicated Videos – an entire video about the brand or the product that they’re sent to you.
- Shorts – a brand sponsors a Short instead of a full video.
In this post, we’re going to focus on long-form partnership pricing which includes Mentions, Integrations, and Dedicated videos.
I’ll be creating an entire segment in this series on YouTube Shorts, so keep an eye out for that.
Now let’s dive into our formula to help you know how much to charge for YouTube partnerships.
How to Calculate Your Rates for a YouTube Partnership
Here’s the formula that you can use to get paid on YouTube:
average view per video x recent engagement rate + contract terms = your rate
Disclaimer: This formula is a guideline! As of right now, when you do research on “how much to charge for collaborations on YouTube” there isn’t a standard or formula out there. Every creator is unique and therefore pricing is unique.
At the end of the day, you’re the business owner. You can charge whatever you want. As a coach, I’m simply suggesting an option that you can use as a starting point. This is the starting point that I teach to my students.
We’re going to start with Integrations because that’s typically the most common YouTube partnership. From there we’ll use our Integration price to calculate Mention and Dedicated Video pricing.
Calculating your average views per video
If you’d like to watch an example of me calculating the average views per video, click the video above and skip ahead to 3:50.
Otherwise, keep reading! To get our average view per video, we’re going to look at your most recent 16 videos. Why? Because brands are going to look at how well your most recent content is performing to gauge how many views they can expect to get.
They’re not scrolling back through your content to the video that went viral 3 years ago. What’s important to brands is your current performance.
Grab your calculator and add up the total views on your 16 most recent YouTube videos. Once you have that number, divide it by 16 (or by the number of videos you took the most recent views from). That answer is your average views per video!
In the example shared above, I calculated average views of 585.13.
Calculating your recent engagement rate on YouTube
Calculating your recent engagement rate on YouTube is pretty straightforward. You’re going to take the average views that you calculated above and divide that by your number of subscribers. That is going to give you your most recent engagement rate.
In the example from the video, I said the channel had 3,000 subscribers – which would give us an engagement rate of 0.2.
So for our base rate on YouTube, we’ll take 585.13 x 0.2 which equals 117.06. Giving us a base rate of $117.06.
Of course, you won’t charge a brand $117.06. Instead, round up to $120 to keep things simple and because we can. So now your rate for an Integration partnership is $120.
Calculating your additional rates on YouTube
So we have your base rate for an Integration on YouTube. Let’s use this to calculate how much you would charge for a Mention and a Dedicated video.
For a Mention, take your base rate for an Integration and cut it in half. This works well because a Mention is typically half the length of an Integration.
For a Dedicated video, take your base rate and double it. This price can vary quite a bit depending on how long the brand wants the video to be. If they want a 5-minute dedicated video, then doubling your base rate feels good. If they want a 10-minute tutorial, you can triple your rate.
The last piece of our formula is contract terms.
Contract Terms
Throughout this guide, I’ve been using the term ‘base rate’ to help you calculate how much you should charge for your YouTube partnerships. That’s because the rest of the formula is your contract terms.
Contract terms are a big deal and they’re definitely something that you don’t want to forget about. This ensures that you’re getting paid to the dollar, the value that you’re contractually providing the brand.
So, what are contract terms and how do you calculate them?
When entering into a partnership, whether free or paid, you are likely going to sign a contract. I tell all of my students to make sure they’re signing a contract. This is going to help protect both parties and keep everyone accountable for what they promised to provide.
Before you sign a contract, you need to read through it and understand what you’re legally agreeing to when you sign it. Because a lot of time, there are things in a contract that you should be paid for on top of creating the video.
In my last post, ‘Calculating Your Instagram Rates’, I went over how much to charge for the following:
Contract Terms
- Deliverables: This is the quantity and type of content that is being asked of you to produce for a brand.
- Usage rights: which is a term commonly found in contracts that states who owns the deliverables and what are they allowed to do with them while they own them.
- And exclusivity: which states you are promising not to work with any of their competitors for X amount of time.
When calculating how much to charge for YouTube partnerships, none of this changes. Deep dive into each of these terms in this blog post or this video (skip ahead to…)
In this post, I want to teach you some new terms that you could charge extra for specifically on YouTube.
Revisions
After sending your content to the brand for approval, it’s possible they might request edits or re-shoots. You can make sure you agree on the amount of revisions that are included in your price in the contract beforehand.
Here’s an example of that:
Industry-standard: Include 1-2 revisions within your base rate price. Any additional revisions or reshoots after that, you can charge extra for.
To set this rate you can choose either $X/hour or $X/new draft.
Turnaround
The other thing that you should charge extra for is a rushed turnaround. In other words, how quickly the brand wants the content delivered and posted.
How to charge? If a brand wants a “rushed” or “expedited” turnaround (within 10 days or less), you can add anywhere between 50-200% of your standard price.
Typically you charge $120 for an integration per post. Two-week turnaround: A 50% rush fee brings the new total to $180. Or if they want to post up within the next few days: a 200% rush fee brings the total to $240.
Organizing Your Brand Partnerships
I want to make your life even easier when it comes to brand deals, organizing all your campaigns, getting revisions from brands, and reading through your contacts. My team uses Rella to organize my partnerships.
Full disclosure: I am an advisor for Rella so I use the platform and every quarter I give my feedback to the owner, Natalie.
There are a million reasons why I love Rella and Natalie is one of those reasons. She is a YouTuber and Creator herself so she knows what it’s like to navigate partnerships. She’s turned her experience into software to make all of this easier. I love supporting other creators and female business owners. Plus Rella is an amazing asset for Influencers and Creators, especially if brand deals are your full-time income.
What is Rella? It’s a platform that simplifies collaboration and content management so that you can track all of the campaigns you’re working on, as well as send, share, and upload content really easily.
Rella features that I love:
- Their AI Contract Uploader, so when you have a contract with a brand you can upload it here and their AI will sort through all the information within the contract and automatically summarize and add it to your campaign: it’ll identify things like exclusivity and usage, etc.
- Sharing content with the brand. You can share a preview link where they can add comments directly in Rella which makes revisions so much easier.
Grab a 14-day free trial for Rella here.
As promised for full transparency, this is how much I charge for YouTube partnerships personally.
What I Currently Charge
Remember, at the end of the day, you’re the business owner. You can set your own rates and charge whatever you want. If you’re unsure of what to charge, or this formula doesn’t calculate the number you want to see, you cando what a lot of creators do, and just pick a number that feels right for you.
For full transparency, this is how much I would charge for YouTube Partnerships.
MY RATES:
- Mention: $2,000
- Integration: $4,000
- Dedicated: $10,000
To learn how to calculate contract terms like Usage Rights & Exclusivity, check out this video next!
The BSP Model
If you’re someone who is serious about being a full-time content creator and you love trainings like this, I want to invite you to join The Build. Scale. Profit. Method. The BSP Model is a bundle of courses structured in a Proven 3 Part Framework teaching you how to build an unforgettable brand, harness the power of organic social media, and make money while doing it.
I can confidently say that there is nothing else out there like the BSP Model because it is exactly what I wish I had when I was starting my own journey. And it’s laid out in the order of the steps I wish I had taken.
With BSP I’ve helped students land $10,000 brand deals, get featured on shelves in their local grocery stores, and work with countless dream brands.
Learn more about The BSP Model here.
Thanks so much for being here and I’ll see you in the next one. Follow your joy!
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