Every brand deal starts with two questions. How many people will see this? And are they the people we sell to?
The first one is easy to answer. Your typical views per video, the median of your recent long-form uploads, tells a brand roughly how many people will see their segment. It's the most important number in a media kit, and it's the one Vid0's YouTube media kit template puts first.
The second question is where most media kits go quiet. YouTube Studio can tell a brand your audience's age range, gender split and top countries. It can't tell them whether your viewers own a laptop, plan to switch banks this year, or have ever bought something a creator recommended. That is what a brand actually wants to know, and the only way to find out is to ask your viewers.
This post covers which questions to ask, how many answers you need before the numbers mean anything, and how to present the results so a brand trusts them.
What Studio covers, and what it can't
| What a brand wants to know | YouTube Studio | Audience survey |
|---|---|---|
| How many people see a typical video | Yes | No |
| Age, gender, top countries, devices | Yes | No need to ask |
| What your viewers do for a living | No | Yes |
| What they plan to buy in your niche | No | Yes |
| Which products and brands they use now | No | Yes |
| Whether they've bought on a creator's recommendation | No | Yes |
Studio data is the floor. Survey data is what moves you from "a channel in our category" to "a channel full of our buyers."
The five questions sponsors care about
You can get everything a brand needs from five questions. Tailor the options to your niche. The examples below are for a tech channel.
- What best describes you? Student, working professional, freelancer or self-employed, business owner, something else. After age, this is the audience fact brands ask about most.
- Are you planning to buy any of these in the next 12 months? A checkbox list of the product categories that sponsor your niche: a laptop, a phone, headphones, a VPN, software for work. This is purchase intent, and it's what brands pay for.
- Which of these do you use now? A checkbox list of brands or tools in your niche. It shows a brand both its existing customers and its competitors' customers in your audience. Both are useful to them.
- Have you ever bought something because a YouTuber recommended it? Yes, more than once / once / no. It's the closest thing you have to a conversion signal before you've run a single sponsorship.
- Roughly how much do you spend on [your niche] in a year? Wide ranges only, and keep it optional. Some people won't answer, and that's fine.
Resist adding more. If you also want to learn what videos to make next, run that as a separate survey. We cover it in how to survey your YouTube audience.
How many responses do you need?
Fewer than you might think, but more than twenty.
As a rough guide, about 100 responses is enough to quote percentages, and 300 or more starts to feel solid. At 100 answers a percentage can be off by about 10 points either way; at 300, by about 6. Below 100, quote counts instead: "41 of 68 viewers plan to buy a laptop this year" is honest, while "60% plan to buy a laptop" from 68 answers looks like you're stretching.
Be upfront about one more thing. The people who answer your survey are your most engaged viewers, not a random sample of everyone who watches. Brands know this. Say it in one line ("from a survey of 214 viewers, October 2026") and they'll trust the rest of the page more, not less.
How to put the results in your kit
Pick the two or three findings that matter most to the brands you pitch, and write each one as a single sentence with the number and the source. For example:
- "58% of 214 surveyed viewers plan to buy a new laptop in the next 12 months."
- "71% have bought a product because a YouTuber recommended it."
- "Notion is the most-used notes app among surveyed viewers (44%), followed by Obsidian (19%)."
Put these in your audience section, right after the Studio numbers, and label them as self-reported survey data. If you send different findings to different brands, keep the full results one click away so a curious brand can check the detail.
If you don't have a media kit yet, start with the basics: who you are, your typical views, your audience, your rates and your past collabs. Vid0's free creator page drafts all of that from your public stats and gives you one link to put in pitch emails. Then add your survey findings to the audience section.
The survey is how you justify your rate
Most rate advice starts from views. The formula Vid0 uses is typical views ÷ 1,000 × your niche's CPM band, which gives you a range rather than a single number. The full method, with worked examples, is in how much to charge for a YouTube sponsorship, or you can plug your numbers into the free YouTube sponsorship rate calculator.
The real question is where in that range you land. The usual advice is to charge toward the top when your audience closely matches the brand. Survey data is how you prove that match. "My viewers are into tech" gets you the bottom of the range. "58% of my viewers plan to buy a laptop this year" gets you the top.
How to run it in Formaly
Step 1: Generate the survey
Start a new survey and describe it:
Create a five-question audience survey for viewers of my tech YouTube
channel. I want to share the results with sponsors. Ask what best
describes them, which of these they plan to buy in the next 12 months
(laptop, phone, headphones, VPN, work software), which of these tools
they use now (Notion, Obsidian, Todoist, Google Keep, none), whether they
have ever bought something a YouTuber recommended, and an optional
question about yearly spend on tech. No name or email fields.
Leave out name and email unless you need them. You don't need to know who answered to tell a brand what your audience buys, and anonymous surveys get more honest answers.
Step 2: Share it and set a close date
Put the link in a pinned comment and mention it in your next video. Set the survey to close automatically after two weeks so your results have a clear date on them.
Step 3: Share the results with a public link
Once it closes, turn on a public results link from the survey dashboard. It gives you a read-only results page you can link from your media kit or paste into a pitch email, so a brand can check the numbers for itself. Email, phone and address questions are left out of public reports automatically, and you can turn the link off at any time.
Step 4: Run it again in six months
Your audience shifts as the channel grows. A survey from two years and 40,000 subscribers ago doesn't describe your audience any more. Re-run it twice a year and update the numbers in your kit.
The short version
Typical views get you into the conversation. Audience fit gets you a better rate. Ask five questions, report the answers honestly, and put them next to your typical views and prices.
Create your audience survey in Formaly. It takes about ten minutes.
Disclosure: I build Vid0 as well as Formaly.