It's Easier to Make $10,000 in Sponsorships Than $10,000 in AdSense. Fight Me.

That tweet aged well.

I posted it a while back and it became one of the most controversial things I'd ever put on the internet. People had opinions. But for the most part, creators who'd actually been grinding toward AdSense thresholds came back and said — yeah, that's exactly right.

Here's the reality. You can have 10,000 subscribers, be getting a couple hundred views per video, and land a four or five figure brand deal. I've seen it happen dozens of times. The math on AdSense doesn't work that way. But sponsorships aren't tied to view count in the same way — they're tied to who's watching and what value you can create for a brand.

Let me show you exactly how this works.

The Mindset Problem Nobody Talks About

Before we get into tactics, I need to address something, because it quietly kills more sponsorship opportunities than any bad pitch ever could.

Impostor syndrome in sponsorships usually comes from childhood. How you were raised. Whether money was taboo in your house. Whether you grew up feeling like you had to minimize yourself around people with more status or resources.

That stuff follows you into your business. It's why creators see a brand reach out and immediately think "who am I to ask for $5,000?" instead of "what is the value I'm actually bringing to the table here?"

And look — I've been there. When April and I got our first brand inquiries back in 2009, I was terrible at this. I felt cool getting a $200 deal. I had no idea what I was leaving on the table. The confidence and negotiating skill I have now came from years of reps, mistakes, and doing the work to unlearn a lot of the financial fear I grew up with.

Here's the reframe that helped me most: selling is service. When you pitch a brand, you're not extracting money from them — you're offering them access to an audience they can't reach any other way. When you recommend a product to your audience, you're solving a problem for someone who trusts you. If the alignment is there, it's genuinely good for everyone. That's not icky. That's a win-win-win.

Gifted Products Are Not Sponsorships

Let me be direct about this because I see creators confused here constantly.

When a brand emails you offering to send a free product in exchange for a dedicated video, that is not a sponsorship. That's called earned media. Brands do this because they can send hundreds of offers out and see who'll talk about them for free. It costs them almost nothing. You're not being sponsored — you're providing a service for the price of a product.

Real sponsorships involve payment. Cash money. For your time, your creativity, your production, and your audience access.

Now — free products can be a legitimate step in a relationship. If you do a review, it performs well, and the brand sees results, that becomes leverage. Which brings me to the follow-up.

The Follow-Up Most Creators Are Too Scared to Send

My friend Nick Nimmin did a deal with a brand a few years back. It went great. He waited for them to come back to him. They didn't. Seven or eight months later, he ran into the brand rep at a conference.

The rep said: "I wish you would have reached out. I would have loved to do more with you, but I just got so busy."

This happens constantly. Brands are not sitting around thinking about you. Their marketing team is running a dozen campaigns, managing internal politics, dealing with the algorithm, handling budget cycles. The relationship doesn't naturally continue — someone has to drive it forward. And that someone needs to be you.

So if you've worked with a brand before — even years ago — reach back out. Not with "hey, we love each other, can we do something?" (yes, I talked someone out of sending that exact email live on the podcast). With research.

Go look at what they've launched recently. Did they enter a new market? Release a new product? Start selling on Amazon when they weren't before? Do their product listing videos look terrible? Now you have angles.

And here's something most creators don't realize: YouTube keeps working for you long after the collaboration ends. Videos you made three years ago might have 6x more views today than when the brand originally paid for them. That's data worth presenting. I call it a relationship recap report — a brief document that says, "here's what we did together, here's what it's generated since then, here's what I'm proposing next."

Brands rarely look back at old campaigns. New people may have joined their team. You putting that context in front of them makes it easy for them to say yes.

The Story That Made a Guy Quit His Day Job

Let me tell you about Lou. He had around 12,000 YouTube subscribers — not tiny, not huge. He got into a conversation with a brand that wanted to start a YouTube channel. They hired him for a consulting analysis — a couple grand for a few calls and a report.

He delivered the report. They said thanks.

A few weeks later, they came back.

"We realized we can't do this ourselves. Can you just do it for us?"

Lou put together four packages at multi-five-figure price points. They picked the top one.

Lou quit his job.

He now runs his own channel and manages that brand's entire YouTube strategy. And the brand never once asked how many subscribers he had. His channel was just the portfolio. His actual value was the expertise.

Here's what I want you to take from that story: you are not just a view-generator. You are an editor, a writer, a producer, an on-camera talent, a strategist, and — critically — someone with real-time knowledge of what's working on the platforms you publish on. Big agencies charge a fortune and often don't understand the nuances of the algorithm as well as a creator who's publishing daily does.

So when you pitch a brand on creating content for them, don't just tell them it's cost-efficient. Tell them it will be more effective than what they're doing elsewhere. Because it will be.

The Video Pitch That Actually Closes Deals

Here's the thing about email pitches right now: everyone has AI. Brands and agencies are drowning in well-written, completely useless outreach. Your perfectly crafted cold email is getting deleted alongside a thousand other perfectly crafted cold emails.

So I started shifting my clients — and myself — to video pitches.

I'll show you exactly what I mean. I made a three-minute video to pitch Shure (the mic brand) on sponsoring Sponsor Games. Here's roughly what it looked like:

I thanked the contact (Laura) for a previous gift they'd sent. Then I referenced their recent activity — I'd noticed they went to NAB, and that their social content this year had been heavy on the 100-year anniversary. Then I told her about the event, said we're doubling attendance next year, and pitched one specific idea: we have a game at Sponsor Games called the Produce Game, where creators get a random object, a brief, and sixty minutes to shoot, edit, and upload a sponsored video. I said the MoveMic Two would be perfect for it.

That's it. Three minutes. Shot on my webcam. No production. Just research, specificity, and a clear idea she could react to.

She replied. We got on a call. She said: "We actually have a brand new product launching a month before your event — can we use that one instead?"

My specific idea wasn't what we ended up doing. But it was specific enough to trigger a real conversation. That's the whole point. You're not pitching something they have to say yes to — you're pitching something concrete enough that they can push back, redirect, and collaborate with you.

The mechanics: record it, upload it as an unlisted YouTube video, and send a simple email with a GIF preview and a link. (Bonus: when they click through, they land on your YouTube channel. Your content is right there.) The whole thing — research included — takes about thirty minutes.

Stop Pitching Your Platform. Start Pitching Their Problem.

This is the fundamental shift that changes everything, especially for smaller creators.

If you pitch a brand and say "let me talk about you on my YouTube channel," the first thing they do is check your views. If you're averaging 200 per video, the conversation usually ends there.

But if you pitch them by saying: "I looked at your online presence and I think you could be telling your brand story in a much more compelling way. I'll create one video a week for your channel, interview people on your team, handle all the editing and production, completely turnkey — $7,500 a month. And hey, go check out my channel — that's my portfolio."

That's a completely different conversation. They're not evaluating your subscriber count. They're evaluating whether you can do the job.

Brands — especially small and mid-size ones — often have one person running their entire marketing operation. If you can take one big thing off their plate and deliver it professionally, that has enormous value regardless of how many people subscribe to your channel.

The One Question That Changes Your Pricing

Before you quote any number to any brand, ask this: "What would success look like for you if this campaign went really well?"

Brands have three types of goals — awareness (spreading the word about a launch or new market), repurposing (getting content they can use in ads and on their site), or conversion (driving measurable sales and sign-ups). Your pricing needs to change based on which one they're after.

Conversion-focused brands are doing CPA math. They have a ceiling. Awareness-focused brands are measuring squishy things like impressions and sentiment — your negotiating leverage is much higher. Same scope of work, completely different price.

The Royal Caribbean deal — $20,000, plus flying us to Spain to ride the maiden voyage of their new ship — came together because I asked what they actually cared about. Turns out it was footage. Great family content they could repurpose. Once I knew that, it changed the whole shape of what we delivered, and it led to them hiring a videography team so we didn't even have to self-shoot.

You can't get to that conversation if you just spit back a number when they first reach out.

If you want the full playbook — the ARC framework, the relationship recap report, the ROPE pitching method, the job title targeting matrix for finding decision makers — it's all in Sponsor Magnet. We just cracked 10,000 copies sold, and I'm genuinely proud of it.

If you want a coach in your corner while you're actually doing deals, that's Wizard's Guild.

And if you want free sponsorship opportunities delivered to your inbox every week — brands actively looking for creators to work with — join the newsletter at creatorwizard.com/join.

What's the brand you've been sleeping on reconnecting with?