The Creator Media Kit: What Brands Actually Read

A media kit is the document a brand reads when deciding whether to pay you, and how much. Most creators either do not have one or send a screenshot of their subscriber count. Both leave money on the table, because the number a brand cares about is almost never the one creators lead with.

This guide covers what belongs in a media kit, what to leave out, and how to present numbers honestly when they are not enormous.

What the document is actually for

A media kit is not a brochure about you. It is a document that helps a marketing manager make a case to their own boss for spending money on you.

That reframing changes everything about what goes in it. The person reading it needs evidence that your audience is their customer, that you can deliver reliably, and that similar work has produced results before. Your growth story and your equipment list do not help them.

The specific question they must answer internally is: "why this creator rather than the other four on my list?" Your media kit should answer that in the first thirty seconds of reading.

What belongs in it

1. Who you are, in two sentences. What the channel covers and who watches it. Not your life story.
2. Audience demographics. Age, gender split, top countries, and device mix if relevant. Straight from YouTube Studio. This is frequently the most important page.
3. Meaningful performance figures. Average views per video over a recent period, watch time, engagement rate. Averages over the last ten to twenty videos are far more credible than lifetime totals.
4. What you offer. Dedicated video, integration, Shorts, newsletter placement, livestream mention. Be specific about what each includes.
5. Previous partnerships, with results where you have permission to share them. Even one case study changes the conversation completely.
6. A sample of your work. Link to one integration you are proud of.
7. Contact details. Obvious, and regularly missing.

What to leave out: your subscriber growth chart if it is flat, your equipment, long biography, and anything you cannot substantiate from analytics.

Presenting numbers that are not huge

Smaller channels frequently outperform large ones for brands, and the media kit is where you make that argument rather than apologising.

Lead with engagement rate rather than raw reach. A channel where a meaningful percentage of viewers comment and click is worth more per view than a large channel with passive viewers, and marketers know this.

Lead with audience specificity. "Nine thousand subscribers, of whom the large majority are professional photographers in the US and UK" is a far stronger pitch to a camera brand than "two hundred thousand general viewers".

Lead with evidence of action. Affiliate conversion figures, click-through on description links, comments showing people bought something on your recommendation. Proof that your audience acts is the single most persuasive thing in the document.

Whether to include prices

Genuinely contested, and the answer depends on volume.

Including prices filters out enquiries you would decline anyway, saves a round of correspondence, and signals confidence. It also caps you — a brand with a larger budget will simply pay your listed rate.

Omitting prices lets you price per opportunity, which usually earns more, but generates back-and-forth with people who were never going to pay.

A practical compromise many creators use: publish a starting-from figure. It filters the unserious without capping the serious. And always price usage rights and exclusivity separately rather than bundling them into a single number, because those are the terms that vary most between deals and cost you most when given away by default.

Format and length

One to three pages. A PDF, sent as an attachment or linked, that opens correctly on a phone because that is where a surprising amount of first reading happens.

Design matters more than creators expect, for an unfair but real reason: a marketing team judges production quality partly by the document, since it is the only work of yours they have seen at the point of first contact. It does not need to be elaborate — clean type, consistent spacing, your channel's colours, screenshots that are legible.

Keep a short version too. A single page suits cold outreach, where nobody will read three pages from someone they have not heard of.

Keeping it current

A media kit with figures from eighteen months ago is worse than none, because it tells a brand you are not paying attention to your own business.

Update it quarterly. Refresh the averages, swap in a recent case study, and re-check the demographics, which drift more than people expect as a channel's content changes. Keep a dated file name so you never accidentally send an old version.

The habit worth building alongside it: after every paid partnership, ask the brand whether you may share the results. Most will agree to something, and a media kit with three real outcomes in it negotiates from an entirely different position than one that simply describes an audience.

Sending it well

The document does not work on its own. How it arrives matters at least as much as what is in it.

Send it to a named person rather than a general enquiries address, and reference something specific about the brand — a product you actually use, a campaign you noticed. Generic outreach with an attached kit is deleted, and the kit never gets opened.

Put the case in the email body, briefly, and treat the kit as supporting evidence rather than the pitch itself. Three sentences on why your audience is their customer, then the attachment for the detail. Marketing managers receive a great many of these, and the ones that get read are the ones that make the argument before asking for the click.

Frequently asked questions