Yeah you see it in the NBA/NFL with a lot of players building their personal brand via Youtube/TikTok/Podcast/etc. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next decade. Will businesses keep dumping money into influencer advertising, or will it die down and go back to just the mega stars getting deals.

I know right now even people with 10-20k followers on a platform can still get brand deals because it is a new form of targeting. I think the hard thing to solve for is how do you measure the ROI besides use code "XYZ" for 20% off your first month or whatever.

In most sports leagues the vast majority of player income is salary from their team. There is something approaching a power law around endorsement money, even in the NBA it’s really only the top 10 earners who make more than 20-30% on their non-basketball revenue streams.

This is true for soccer, but almost all American athletes make the vast majority of their income off team salary.

Not really. Endorsements and Advertising are a good cut of the money but most of the big money in streaming is coming directly from fans, whether through premium subscriptions or donations.