Nowadays, KOLs, often known as key opinion leaders or influencers, are very popular on various social platforms ranging from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc. and some of them are making pretty good income from advertising. Some people refuse to admit these KOLs as a formal career, but, hey, as long as the jobs generates profit, why not?
The way KOLs earn money differs from platform to platform. In some particular platforms, KOLs can even earn a certain amount of reward. One notable platform is YouTube, where KOLs can monetize their videos to get money under the YouTube Partner Program[1].
However, since the payment from platforms like YouTube often depends on some un-controllable factors such as view count of the video, there is little guarantee on how much they will get. Hence, the bulk of KOLs’ income often depends on their trustworthy business partners, sponsors or advertisers.
How can KOLs earn money from sponsorships?
In getting sponsorships, there are usually two ways to do so.
1. Partnering with Sponsors
Having sponsors reaching out to KOLs directly, YouTubers will receive a certain sum of money from their sponsors by filming some footage with the sponsor’s product. However, cooperating in this way often requires the KOLs and the sponsors to go through many rounds of back and forth in the storyline design, script writing and approval process between each other until the video is posted, and this process can easily take multiple weeks, if not months, to complete. Therefore, this kind of cooperation might not be time-efficient or stable (very often the job can be canceled at the middle of the process), but the earning each time is usually satisfying.
2. Signing-up with an agency or a traditional MCN (Multi-Channel Network) firm
Since dealing with sponsors directly is time consuming, some KOLs may choose to partner with some traditional MCN firms, where they would be taken care of whole-roundly. The MCN firms normally would assist the KOLs in many ways to ensure that their popularity, income, and content quality can be satisfactory to both the KOLs and the sponsors. The MCN firms might even have various marketing campaigns dedicated to the KOLs. With this mode of operation, KOL’s income might be steadier compared with dealing with sponsors directly.
One major drawback of this is that the KOLs often would have less control of their channel and production. In addition, in order to improve or keep the popularity of their channels, KOLs still have to produce videos regularly even there is no sponsorship for most of their productions. In fact, according to our rough estimates, very few KOLs would have more than 20% of their videos sponsored. This is actually one of the major reasons why KOLs have to charge the advertisers a high price whenever they have a chance to be sponsored, because they need to rely on this income to fund the unsponsored productions.
How can KOLs generate revenue from unsponsored videos?
A new type of Artificial Intelligence enabled MCN has recently emerged, where KOLs can earn revenue in extra to what YouTube pays EVEN from their unsponsored videos. With the aid of some cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies, this type of MCNs can convert these 80+% otherwise unsponsored videos from their partnering KOLs into valuable advertising space, and automatically insert advertisements into these KOL videos. As the KOLs do not need to film tailored content for any particular products, they can have 100% control of their content, while being able to earn extra on top of revenue by YouTube.
Therefore, if you are a KOL, and have unsponsored videos, consider this new type of AI Enabled MCNs! Zyviz.com is currently the leading AI Enabled MCN platform in the world, and it helps you turn your unsponsored videos into valuable advertising space at absolutely no extra effort, enabling you to easily monetize your otherwise unsponsored video. Better yet, as Zyviz.com only wants your otherwise unsponsored videos, you have all the freedom and power to keep all the income from other sources such as YouTube and all the sponsored videos.
If you would like to learn more about how to earn extra profit from your unsponsored videos, you can visit www.zyviz.com or contact info@zyviz.com.