How to Price Your First Brand Deal

The first sponsorship email arrives and the honest reaction is some mix of excitement and complete blankness about what to charge. Most creators guess low. The problem isn’t the money left on that first table; it’s that your first price becomes your anchor, and clawing an anchor upward takes years.

A starting formula

Take your true average views per video. Not your best video, not your subscriber count: the average of your last ten, minus any outlier that went viral. Multiply by a niche CPM: roughly $10 to $20 per thousand views for gaming, $20 to $35 for tech and AI, $30 to $50 for finance. That’s the base price for a standard 60 to 90 second integration.

So a finance channel averaging 15,000 views: 15 × $35 gives roughly a $500 floor, and honestly for finance I’d start the conversation at $600 to $700, because the first offer is never the ceiling and brands expect a counter.

A dedicated video is two to four times the integration price. Usage rights, exclusivity, and extra revision rounds are all separate line items, which is a longer topic and its own post.

The three mistakes

Pricing on subscribers. Brands buy views, not subscribers. If your views are strong relative to your subscriber count, pricing on subscribers actively undersells you.

Accepting “exposure plus product.” A free product is not payment unless the product costs more than your rate. It’s a discount on the invoice at best. The brands that pay in exposure are precisely the ones whose exposure is worth the least.

Answering “what’s your rate?” first. Ask for their budget before you name a number. Half the time the budget is higher than what you were about to say. This one sentence, “what range did you have budgeted for this placement?”, has paid for itself more than anything else I’ve taught creators.

One more thing, because I’m an accountant and can’t help it: that sponsorship income is taxable, and if you’re in Canada you may need to think about GST/HST registration sooner than you expect. That’s covered in the tax post.

If you’d rather have someone negotiate for you, that’s literally what we do, and it costs nothing unless we close a deal we brought you.