[posnet]

It's always interesting to note the waves of sponsors flow through youtube/podcasts. Raid, Nordvpn, recently Incogni. I wonder if the ad spend actually pays off for them, or if it's just VC dollars being shoveled into the furnaces.

[aimazon]

If they’re high margin businesses that can lock in customers it can work out for them. That’s why VPN sponsors do so well: very high margins and the deals they advertise are typically multi-year upfront payments so the signups immediately repay the advertising cost.

The worst examples are low-margin businesses that have high churn, e.g: food subscription boxes. Hello Fresh etc have extremely high churn so they’re paying advertisers orders of magnitude more than they make per sale. That’s why they’ve moved from “free trial” offers to things like “free desert for the lifetime of your subscription” to spread the cost of the offer over the lifetime of the subscription (but even that doesn’t make the model profitable).

Rule of thumb: when advertising via influencers (YouTube, podcasts etc.) assume you will receive a single payment from each customer before they churn. If the first (and only) payment the customer makes doesn’t cover the advertising cost (and operating costs) it’s a very bad idea. Free trials are the worst option because it’ll go from 1 payment to 0 payments.

[arrowsmith]

If VPNs have such big margins then why doesn't a competitor undercut them all on price?

[wkat4242]

Sometimes they even screw the influencers out of their income lol: https://www.newsweek.com/honey-coupon-browser-extension-mrbe...

Also mentioned in the post's link by the way.

But also TikTok was probably a net negative for him as they lured viewers away from YouTube.

I never watch MrBeast and I always block ads and sponsors (sponsorblock) anyway so I didn't really notice any of these things. It's really nice not being overwhelmed with comercialism.

[pests]

LegalEagle and Wendover Productions have brought a class action against Honey/Paypal.

[ChocolateGod]

I'm surprised over the Honey blowback, how else did people think they made their money?

[progbits]

I see Brilliant a lot on technical channels I follow and I'm very confused, the "courses" they are selling all seem like highschool level at best, but very advanced technical channels go "I've learned all this from our sponsor Brilliant".

[vasco]

Next you'll tell us you think those really jacked guys do it because of a specific brand of protein powder and not buttloads of steroids.

[bombcar]

Advertising is paying people to lie, and that's becoming more and more apparent.

Or what they "learned from our sponsor" is that they're offering courses.

[xmprt]

As someone who has done some of the free Brilliant puzzles, I can't say I've learned a ton from them but it does feel nice to exercise some of my brain muscles occasionally in ways that aren't directly related to my job even if it's just high school level physics or math.

[bakugo]

> but very advanced technical channels go "I've learned all this from our sponsor Brilliant".

Yeah, because they're paid to say that. You don't actually think they use the service themselves, do you?

[grecy]

As a YouTuber it is fascinating to see the waves of "free product" sponsorship emails pushing harder and harder for me to review something, then a few weeks later to see the waves of videos in my niche from everybody saying "This is the greatest x on the market, you NEED to buy one".

One product in particular I must have received twenty emails from different marketing agencies trying to give me one for free. It's now pretty popular in my niche, though when reviewed by an actual expert they said it was junk.

[Krasnol]

Don't know about the margins, but every time I talk with non-IT people on the topic of VPNs, they know about NordVPN. I've heard it being used synonymous to VPN.

Seems to work somehow.

[underseacables]

I think the vast majority of ad spending goes into the furnace. Most people block it out, skip it, or ignore it. Unless it's really good, or unique, it is just universal noise now.