Making money is important for turning your creative pursuits into your career, but money isn’t the only factor to consider. One of the most common sources of income—especially for creators on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram—is brand deals.
Not every sponsorship is made equal, so this post will discuss reasons why you might not want to pursue sponsorships in their entirety or particular brand deals on a case-by-case basis.
Independence With Your Content
Some creators may discuss controversial subjects, criticize companies, or make content that otherwise is best without external influences. These creators may expose scams, predatory financial schemes, or fulfill the necessary journalistic role of independent critique of establishments.
As such, taking any sponsorship can be a risk to these creators’ credibility and independence in uncovering these issues. YouTubers like Coffeezilla who expose predatory fake gurus, crypto scams, and other major problems in finances and the influencer economy rarely (if ever) take sponsorships in order to maintain their credibility—if any brand they work with turns out to be predatory in any way, what does that do to their credibility?
This is not to say that creators who investigate issues can’t ever take sponsorships—in fact, most do. Instead, if you fall into this category, you should take care before accepting sponsorships and be choosy in dealing with brands.
Changing Who You Are or Your Persona Is
Many brand deals require you to be somewhat non-controversial or brand appropriate—it’s one of the major considerations brands have when deciding who to work with. If you don’t want to change what you do for a brand, brand deals might not be your priority—at least with brands that have such requirements.
For example, you might have a somewhat unfiltered persona in your content, and some brands might be turned off by that. However, if brands not only tolerate but appreciate your persona, then you should pursue these brands for deals.
The point it this: you might not want to change who you are in order to get more brand deals. If so, instead choose brands who appreciate and embrace your unique voice rather than those who seek to moderate it.
Making your Creativity Feel Like Work
Brand deals make you accountable to other people, and they add extra work to the content you make. If the driving force pushing you to create is the joy of creativity without feeling like you’re working, brand deals can harsh that vibe.
Importantly, following your passion as a career invariably requires you to do things you aren’t passionate about to turn that passion into a career. I love writing, recording videos, and sharing ideas, but I don’t love tedious editing or YouTube metadata such as tags. My passion for the parts I love is why I do the parts I feel less strongly about.
The same goes for many musicians—the part most serious musicians are passionate about is simply playing their instrument. They might not love arranging gigs, recording albums, or managing a social media presence, but the love for their instrument pushes them forward.
Success in content creation is largely an endurance game, and it’s important to be sustainable in your creative endeavors to have said endurance. You might need brand deals to make enough money to pay the bills, but doing too many brand deals may sap your energy and hurt your creative spirit. Following your passion requires non-passionate tasks, but ensure you’re going at a sustainable pace.
But this is to say—if focusing on money and brand deals hurts they joy you feel in creating, don’t do them as much!
Protecting Your Audience
Audiences like to financially support the creators they follow (or influencer brand deals wouldn’t exist), but many, many brand deals are from shady companies, have products irrelevant to you or your audience, or some combination of these.
This is not to say you have to feel passionately about any company you work with—Raid Shadow Legends pays many creators’ bills—but if you think a deal is a bad fit for you or your audience or even actively harmful, don’t take it!
Whether it’s something potentially harmful to your audience like gambling or crypto schemes, something you simply don’t believe in or agree with, like a mobile game you’re disinterested in, or something you simply don’t feel like selling to your audience, ensure you keep your audience’s interests at heart.
Your integrity is your greatest asset as a creator—protect it, and protect your audience from bad, potentially predatory deals.
If the Deal Is Predatory
I’ve discussed predatory brand deals in other content, namely my deep dive on the types of brand deals you might encounter.
To summarize, some deals are predatory and exploitative of you, your creativity, and your audience. The main example is companies that only offer affiliate revenue without offering anything upfront at all.
Other examples may include:
- Companies low-balling you (we’ll have a video on how to calculate what you deserve to charge later)
- Scams – whether against you or your audience, like many cryptocurrencies or platforms outside the mainstream ones (some prominent YouTubers seem to promote a different crypto scam every few months))
- Companies with absurd deliverables or outrageous contingencies for paying you—that being, they ask for something unrealistic of you, or they won’t pay you unless you reach certain goals
Know your worth, and know why companies benefit in these deals too! If whatever the company offers you seems too good to be true, it probably is. Likewise, if what a company offers you seems like a load of rubbish, don’t take the deal.
Major Disagreements With the Company
A company might reach out to sponsor you, and they might vocally support causes or politicians you strongly disagree with. In this case, working with that company in a brand deal would tell your audience that you support this company. Integrity matters most, and that too goes for your ideals.
However, if you reject every company that has ever donated to something you oppose, no matter how small or privately, there may not be any more companies to work with at all. Your level of tolerance may vary in these things, but you’ll likely want to avoid the most vocal or publicly controversial companies surrounding issues you disagree with.
For example, you might reject an offer from Starbucks if you’re pro-union, Chick-fil-A if you support LGBTQ+ rights, or Disney if you are concerned with the growing monopolization of media. These are a few obvious examples, and it’s important to do a bit of research into brands before you work with them.
An easy rule of thumbs is to avoid working with brands that you would avoid for your own moral or political reasons.
Focusing on Your Own Business
I recently made a post on how to monetize without brand deals, and it effectively equates to turning your creativity into a vehicle for a business. Your personal focus might be on self-driven monetization strategies and building a business rather than working with brands.
For example, if you’ve developed a great course, work of art, or digital product, the advertising time in your video may be much better spent promoting your own products, from which you take all the profit, rather than promoting a sponsor and only getting a small cut. Similarly, the time spent making the ad for a brand deal might be better spend developing your own business.
You can build your own business and take brand deals—brand deals can even be your best and largest income from that business. However, depending on your objectives, your focus and strategy may be better without them.
All in all, if your focus is on building a business, you might not want to spend your efforts building someone else’s.
Your Integrity Counts
While we’ve gone over several scenarios where you might not want sponsorships in general or particular brand deals, the biggest factor to consider is your integrity. You can condense almost all of these rules into one statement:
If a deal harms your integrity, don’t take it.
Your integrity might require you to take no sponsorships for journalistic independence, or it might lead you to reject a perfectly fine deal you think isn’t useful for your audience. Your integrity is why your audience trusts you, and it takes years to build but can be broken with one bad deal. Maintain your integrity as a creator at all costs, and you’ll never need to worry.
Andy Cormier 