YouTube sponsorship placement

Ninety seconds inside the videos your audience already chose to watch.

Pulzzer finds the channels, screens them on numbers that can't be bought, negotiates the rate and runs the campaign end to end. You approve a shortlist and a script. That is the entire ask on your side.

Audience retention · a typical 12-minute upload your placement
0:00Placed early, while retention is still high12:04
Deliverable
60–90 second integrated segment
Shortlist
Same day, with the numbers behind it
Named channels
Within 48 hours, re-confirmed that week
Reporting
Day 7 and day 30, per placement
The mechanism

A pre-roll is an interruption. A read is a recommendation.

Nobody chose your pre-roll. They chose the channel. When a host reads your copy in their own voice, a small amount of the credibility they spent years building transfers to you — and that transfer is the entire product. It is why a well-matched ninety-second read outperforms a perfectly targeted banner that nobody looks at.

Which means the match matters more than the reach. A large channel with a disengaged audience is worth less than a smaller one whose viewers act on what the host tells them. Reach is easy to buy. Trust isn't, and it doesn't come in bulk.

Most of what you pay an agency for is not the creator. It is knowing which channel is worth the money before you spend it.

That judgement is the work. It is also the part that is hardest to see from the outside, so here is what it protects you from.

Screening

Most channels never reach your shortlist.

Subscriber count is the easiest number on YouTube to buy, and it is still the number most of this industry quotes on. We don't. A channel has to clear our standard before you ever see its name — however good it would look on a media plan.

Audiences that don't turn up

A large following and a small viewership means you are being sold a number nobody watches. We price on what a video actually does, not on what sits under the channel name.

Channels that have quietly stopped

A back catalogue is not a schedule. If a creator isn't publishing reliably now, your placement is a maybe with a date attached — and you find out weeks after you paid.

Traffic that isn't people

Inflated audiences leave a signature. We know what it looks like, we check for it on every channel, and we walk away when we find it rather than passing the problem to you.

Viewers who watch but never move

Engagement is not intent. A channel can be healthy on every visible measure and still have an audience that has never bought anything a host recommended. This is the hardest call in the job and it is where most of our time goes.

Channels your competitor already owns

We pull the sponsorship history of every channel before it reaches you. If a direct competitor ran there recently, the audience has already heard that pitch and the host's endorsement of you is worth less — sometimes a lot less. It cuts the other way too: a channel with a clean history of category-adjacent deals has an audience proven to act on exactly this kind of recommendation.

Channels that would overcharge you

We hold our own record of what channels in each category actually quote, built from every negotiation we run. A rate card that looks reasonable in isolation is often 40% above what comparable audiences go for — and you would have no way of knowing that from the outside.

The shortlist is the deliverable before the deliverable.

By the time a name reaches you it has already survived a review you didn't have to run, against standards we've set from watching what actually converts and what quietly doesn't.

You see the evidence, not the assertion. Every channel we put forward arrives with the numbers that earned it a place — so you can disagree with us, which is the point of showing them.

Process

Four steps. Three of them are ours.

01

You tell us the audience

Your side

Who you want reached, which markets, roughly what you have to spend and when you'd like it live. One email is enough to start — we'll come back with questions rather than a form to fill in.

02

We return a shortlist with the numbers attached

Our side

Channels that cleared the screen, each with the performance figures that earned it a place and one price per placement, quoted in full. You see the evidence rather than an assurance that we checked.

03

You approve. We contract, brief and check

Our side

Rate, deliverable, exclusivity window and usage rights agreed with the creator so you sign one document. Talking points written to fit the host's voice rather than override it, reviewed for claim accuracy, with disclosure handled before anything is filmed. You see the script before the camera turns on.

04

It ships, and you get honest numbers

Our side

We confirm publication, verify the disclosure is correct and present, and report at day 7 and day 30 with tracked-link data per placement — including the ones that underperformed and what we think went wrong.

The work

Everything between a yes and a live video.

Step three above is one line on the page and most of the invoice. This is what is actually inside it, per placement, every time.

01 Source
  • Build the candidate pool against your audience, not a category label
  • Screen every channel on delivered performance
  • Pull sponsorship history and clear competitor conflicts
  • Benchmark the asking rate against what comparable channels take
  • Re-confirm availability and price the week we name them
02 Contract
  • Negotiate rate, slot and publication window
  • Agree the deliverable in writing — length, placement, integration
  • Category exclusivity for an agreed period
  • Usage rights for your own channels, scoped before filming
  • Revision rounds, kill fee and what happens if a date slips
03 Produce
  • Write talking points that survive being said in the host's voice
  • Review every claim for accuracy before it is recorded
  • Paid-partnership disclosure, written and spoken, done correctly
  • Tracked links and unique codes issued per placement
  • Script reviewed and signed off before the camera turns on
04 Verify
  • Confirm it published, publicly, on the agreed date
  • Check the segment ran at the agreed length and position
  • Verify the disclosure is present and compliant
  • Pay the creator on our schedule so the next booking is easy
  • Report at day 7 and day 30 against what you paid

Any one of these is manageable on a Tuesday afternoon. All of them, per placement, across a roster, while a creator is slow to reply and a legal team wants the usage rights redrawn — that is the part people underestimate, and it is the part that quietly eats a marketing manager's month.

Fit

It works when the product explains itself.

We don't qualify by industry — a category label tells you nothing about whether a placement will land. Three things actually decide it.

A viewer gets it in ninety seconds

No setup, no demo, no diagram. If the host can describe what it does in two sentences and the audience nods, it works. If it needs a whitepaper, it doesn't.

They can act the moment they hear it

Download, sign up, start a trial. A link and a code should be the whole distance between hearing about you and using you.

You can describe who wants it

Not a demographic — a person with a situation. That description is what we match against a channel's actual audience.

Where we'd tell you not to bother

  • Enterprise software with a six-month cycle and a procurement committee at the end of it.
  • Anything that needs a live demo or a salesperson before it makes sense.
  • Products that can't be promoted under an honest paid-partnership disclosure.
  • A single placement expected to carry a quarter. Creator marketing compounds; one shot rarely lands.
Commercials

One number per placement, agreed before you commit.

You get a single price covering the creator, the brief, the contracting, the compliance check, the tracked links and the report. It isn't a share of your media budget, it isn't billed by the hour, and nothing gets added to it after you've signed.

One videoTest

A single integrated segment on one screened channel. The honest way to find out whether an audience responds to you before committing real budget to the answer.

Paid in full upfront on a first engagement.
Four videosFlight

A run across several channels in the same audience, sequenced over weeks so you can read the difference between them instead of guessing at a blended number.

50% on booking, balance within 14 days of the last publication.
MonthlyAlways-on

A standing rotation. Fresh channels enter every month, the ones that convert stay on for as long as you want them, and the ones that don't are quietly replaced — so the roster sharpens instead of going stale. Repeat volume also buys better rates from creators, and that saving is yours.

Monthly, planned a quarter at a time.

Creators are paid on our schedule, not on yours. A slow invoice upstream never becomes a creator's problem — which is exactly why the good ones take our calls the second time.

Questions

The things worth asking before you commit.

What if the video underperforms?

We don't guarantee views, and you should be wary of anyone who does — nobody controls YouTube's distribution, least of all an agency.

What we do guarantee: the placement runs as specified, the disclosure is correct, the tracking works, and the report tells you the truth including when the truth is disappointing. If a channel we put forward lands well under its own recent average, we say so, we tell you why we think it happened, and it comes off the roster.

How is the price worked out?

From what the channel actually delivers — real viewership on recent videos, and the going rate for that kind of audience — quoted to you as one number before you commit to anything.

You're buying a delivered placement rather than a media plan with line items, and the number doesn't move once it's agreed.

Do you only work in English?

No. We place across languages and markets. The signals we screen on are numbers, and numbers don't care what language a channel publishes in.

Where we don't know a market well enough to have an opinion worth paying for, we'll say so rather than guess at it.

How quickly can something go live?

Shortlist same day, named channels within 48 hours. After that the creator's own calendar sets the pace — most publish two to four weeks out, and the ones worth having are booked further ahead than that.

Anyone promising you a strong channel next week is selling you the slot nobody else took.

Who owns the content afterwards?

The creator owns their video. Usage rights for your own channels — paid social, your site, a sales deck — are negotiated per placement and written into the agreement before filming.

We'll always ask what you want up front, because buying those rights after publication costs several times what it costs before.

Get in touch

Tell us what you're promoting.

Rough is fine. We'll come back with a straight answer on whether this is a fit — including when it isn't, and why.

Or write directly
ali@pulzzer.com Replies within one business day, Monday to Friday.

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