This College Lacrosse Player Earned $215K Online in 12 Months

Mitchell Pehlke is a division 1 lacrosse player at Ohio State University 🥍

He’s been a youtuber since 2016 and had started making money from his small channel.

He says in a video from June 2022…

In 2018 I made $883.11.

In 2019 I made $555.17, half the year got cut off because I got to Ohio State.

In 2020 I made $0.

See, there was a rule in the USA that forbade college athletes from monetizing their “name, image, or likeness” 😢

So, for Mitchell…

The day I stepped on Ohio State’s campus… I had to demonetize my whole channel and stop selling merch because I was a college athlete.

But midway through 2022, the rule changed 🥳

Suddenly Mitchell and all other college athletes in the USA were allowed to make money from their own name, image, and likeness.

Over the next 12 months, Mitchell earned about $15,000 from ads on his YouTube channel, which now has 55k subscribers.

But that was just a small fraction of his income.

He says in the same video…

brand deals and paid content, this is where myself and other creators make a bulk of their money.

… I’ve done brand deals and paid content with The Cheesecake Factory, IHOP, Degree deodorant, STX lacrosse company, Jason shampoo, Rowdy energy drinks and Opendorse.

I can’t say the exact amount of money i made with these companies because of the contracts I’ve signed, but I can say it’s a little bit over two $200,000.

That’s about $30,000 per brand deal 🤯

A couple of Mitchell’s brand deal videos…

• STX, mentioned at the 5:45 mark of this YouTube video…

• Cheesecake Factory ad on his TikTok (95k followers there)

Pretty cool that college athletes can now earn money that way.

Though it does sound like a lot of work: Mitchell produces mucho content on top of being a D1 athlete and attending classes.

I’m thinking there must be an opportunity there for an agency to do the video editing and manage the online presence of these athletes 🤔

Opendorse – one of Mitchell’s sponsors – is also interesting, like Cameo but niched down for college athletes = another way for people like Mitchell to monetize.

Lastly, in that first video from Mitchell linked above, he shares a clip from YouTubers Colin and Samir talking about ad revenue…

There’s so many reasons why you can’t predict how much money you’ll actually make from a video. And some of those reasons have to do with the seasonality of when you uploaded the video. Meaning certain seasons carry higher ad rates based on how advertisers are purchasing.

Like the holiday season, November and December are a great time to make a really good YouTube video because the ad rates are really high. So many people are advertising on YouTube [at that time] to try and get you to buy their products.

So if you’ve got a really good video idea, save it for November / December.

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