What brands check on your YouTube before they reach out
The numbers and signals a brand looks at on YouTube before sending a deal your way.
YouTube sponsorships tend to involve bigger budgets and longer lead times than a single Instagram post, so brands (or the agencies buying on their behalf) do more homework here than almost anywhere else. Knowing what they're checking helps you get ready before the email lands.
Average views, not subscriber count
Subscriber count is the number creators talk about, but it's not the number brands buy against. What matters is average views on your last 10-20 videos, because that's the realistic reach a sponsored segment will get. A channel with 200K subscribers and 8K average views is a worse buy than a channel with 40K subscribers and 15K average views, and experienced buyers know it.
Retention, if they can get it
Sophisticated brands will ask for a screenshot of your audience retention graph on a recent video, or judge it indirectly from watch-time-dependent signals like average view duration in your public analytics (if you share it) or comment patterns. A channel where viewers consistently drop off in the first 30 seconds is a red flag no view count can hide.
Comment section health
Brands read your comments. Are people asking genuine follow-up questions, sharing their own experience, or debating the topic? Or is it mostly generic "first!" and emoji spam? Real engagement in comments is one of the few signals that's hard to fake at scale.
Video quality and audio, specifically
Not production value in the "did you rent a studio" sense — but is the audio clean, is the video watchable, does it look like something a brand would be comfortable putting their name next to. This gets checked literally by watching a recent video, not just reading stats.
Niche consistency
A brand selling productivity software wants a channel that's mostly about productivity, tools, or work, not a channel that jumps between gaming, vlogs, and finance. Consistency of topic makes the audience-fit case for them without extra explanation.
Upload consistency
Brands buying a sponsorship want to know the channel will still exist and still be active when the video needs to post, and ideally when a follow-up or renewal comes up months later. A channel with long gaps between uploads reads as a riskier partner even if the content itself is strong.
Past sponsorship integrations
If you've done brand deals before, they'll watch how you handled the integration: is it a jarring ad-read bolted onto the video, or worked into the content naturally? How long is the sponsored segment relative to the whole video? This tells them what working with you will actually look like.
Audience demographics, if available
For any brand targeting a specific market (age range, geography, gender skew), your YouTube Studio audience data — if you're willing to share a screenshot — is often the deciding factor, more than any of the above.
What to do about it
- Track and be ready to share average views and view duration on recent uploads, not just subscriber count.
- Keep audio and lighting solid even on lower-budget videos.
- Pick a lane and stay close to it.
- Reply to comments; it keeps the section active and shows you read them.