Dedicated YouTube Review With No Verdict Approval

A dedicated review earns its fee only when the creator has held the product for at least fourteen days before recording, and the fee buys the segment, not the verdict. That is a clause in every brief I write: no approval over conclusions, and the creator keeps the full fee if the conclusion is unfavourable. Brands that cannot sign that clause are better served by an agency that will let them write the words, and I say so on the first call rather than the fourth. Why fourteen days: Review audiences hear hesitation before they can name it. A creator handed a login on Tuesday and filming on Wednesday produces a segment where retention falls inside the first thirty seconds after the sponsor mention, and the fall carries into the channel's next upload. I read that curve on every placement I run, at the mention timestamp and thirty seconds past it. A review recorded without use is an advertisement with a face on it, and the audience prices it that way within two uploads. Choosing the channel: I look at the last twelve uploads for a steady comment-to-view ratio and for the purchased-view signature, the graph that spikes within twelve hours then flattens while average view duration sits under a quarter of the runtime. Then I read the comment sections under the channel's previous three sponsorships. If that audience treated them as an interruption to be skipped, the slot is already spent and no fee restores it. Subscriber count is the last number I look at and never the reason I place. Crypto and web3 briefs: I check the product before I check the channel. Promotion of digital asset services to a French audience is limited to registered providers, and MiCA moved the reference point to a CASP authorisation. Where a token or an exchange cannot produce one and the audience sits in France, I decline rather than hand the exposure to a creator who will carry it personally and permanently. The mention Collaboration commerciale belongs in the spoken segment and in the description, not only in YouTube's paid-promotion checkbox, which a viewer sees for a few seconds at the start and never again. What ships: The creator brief and the test protocol, written so the creator can disagree with you inside it. The placement, with a chapter marker on the segment so it can be cited and linked directly. A pinned comment the creator writes. Description disclosure and a tracked link with a code short enough to survive being read aloud. Fourteen days after publication: retention at the mention, click-through from description and pinned comment, branded search movement in your market over the same window, and my reading of which of the three moved and which did not. Not included: Script approval. Editing beyond correcting a factual error about your product. Any right to take the video down, because a channel that removes a segment on request has told its audience exactly what the segment was. Cutting the review into your own paid media is a separate negotiation with that creator, priced before the shoot rather than after it performs. Not for: Products still in development, where the creator would be reviewing a promise. Companies whose legal function must approve every sentence a third party says about them. Operators without a licence in the market they are targeting. And anyone who wants a review because a competitor got one, a motive that produces precisely the segment viewers skip.