Most of House of Highlights’ revenue driven by its creator content comes from brand deals on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Brands pay to sponsor House of Highlights’ content, as well as for custom segments, product placement, brand integrations and callouts. Revenue also comes from creator-led branded content separate from HoH’s own franchises, such as with advertisers like Xbox, Exxon and Corona.

While House of Highlights has worked with creators for years – such as with groups like Supreme Dreams, Through The Wire and BroadcastBoys – a lot of House of Highlights’ recent efforts have been focused on live appointment-viewing events in order to build a fandom of young sports fans around creator-led franchises. Live content brings in the “biggest results [i.e. viewership] in terms of creators’ ability to drive and move audiences,” Muller said.

Advertisers back live, creator-led competitions

House of Highlights hosts three “Showdown” livestream competitions a year, where creators go head-to-head in sports challenges often timed around key sports events. Pizza Hut is a seven-figure sponsor for three Showdowns, including two competitions in 2021 and an upcoming dodgeball competition that will be shot live from RDC World’s DreamCon Fan Festival in Texas on July 15, Muller said. Netflix sponsored a “Creator League” live basketball challenge tournament on YouTube to promote the premiere of the movie “Hustle.”

Other recent advertisers include PlayStation, which sponsored the HoH Showdown Knockout Live event and HoH Creator League live event during NBA-Allstar Weekend, and Corona, which has sponsored HoH’s episodic series “Highlight House,” where each season is focused on creators from a specific sport or group. Season four of “Highlight House” will premiere this fall.

House of Highlights’ sales team secures advertisers for creator content and pays creators a fee for their participation in the competition events, a spokesperson said. They declined to share the range of those fee payments.

Audiences are increasingly tuning in

HoH has “steadily increased” the size of its deals with advertisers on creator-led content as its audience grows, the spokesperson said, though they declined to share their average deal size. As influencer marketing budgets grow, “brands are looking to break out of the traditional media mold,” Danielle Wiley, CEO of influencer marketing agency Sway Group, said in an email.

“Younger audiences get pretty much all of their news and information from social media… so it’s vital that brands shift dollars to influencer marketing in order to reach …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron