Like a lot of 20-something American guys, Brett Kollmann loved to talk football. So in early 2017, he decided, with the support of his then-girlfriend, to quit his job as a production assistant at NFL Network in Los Angeles to make football-focused YouTube videos full-time.
“I didn’t make any money for my first year,” Kollmann told TheWrap. “My girlfriend and I slept on an air mattress in an office at her parent’s house.”
Things have changed since then.
Kollmann’s YouTube channel — which specializes in deep-dives on the strategic decisions teams make, as well as profiles of players like Rams receiver Puka Nacua and Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels — has become one of the most popular football accounts on the platform. His channel has 416,000 subscribers, and his videos have racked up nearly 74 million views.
Seven years later, Kollmann said he makes $40,000 per month during the NFL season off his combined YouTube ads and other revenue streams. But only a third of his monthly income comes from ads. The rest, he said, comes from his deal with fantasy sports betting site Underdog, partnerships with companies like ticket-selling app Gametime and merchandise sales.
“It’s not about getting money from the platform,” Kollmann said of YouTube. “It’s about using the platform to either make bigger business deals or just build businesses yourself.”
With the influencer economy under pressure, YouTubers like Kollmann are finding ways to depend less on ads as their main source of income. Instead, they are leveraging their channels — and their large audiences — to create other business opportunities.
“All of a sudden, sports reporting went from a modest, middle-class job, where you don’t get that much money, but you get access and it’s kind of cool,” Grant Cohn, another NFL YouTube creator, told TheWrap. “Now it’s like, you can actually make a lot of money talking about sports.”
From an air mattress to a home in Orange County
Two years after starting his channel in 2017, Kollmann was making about $30,000 per year between YouTube ads and small partnerships. Things took off exponentially from there. As he racked up more views and subscribers, sponsorships from companies like Underdog started augmenting the money he was making from ads.
“Within three years, it went from, ‘Oh, I’m making enough to pay rent on a one-bedroom apartment,’ to, ‘Oh, I can buy a house,’” Kollmann said.
Which is what he did, with his now-wife, in Orange County.
Cohn, meanwhile, became a go-to YouTuber for all things San Francisco 49ers, with 76,000 subscribers following his often-sardonic video reports on the team. In late 2019, his journalism career wasn’t going anywhere. Cohn, who was working as a part-time Niners reporter for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, applied for a full-time reporting job at the Sacramento Bee. He didn’t get it. That’s when Robert Saleh, the 49ers’ defensive coordinator at the time, gave him some advice: Forget about writing, you need to get into video.
Cohn listened. With credentials from the team, he started posting clips to YouTube religiously in early 2020, offering fans a mix of practice footage, daily reports and opinionated analysis. He quickly saw that YouTube content resonated with fans.
“During the pandemic, I figured out, ‘Oh, there’s all of these people who want to consume their news this way, and no one is giving it to them.’”
Part of why creators have found so much success talking about sports is that YouTube has become a top news source for millions of Americans. A recent Pew Research Center survey found 32% of adults get their news regularly from YouTube, second only to Facebook among social media sites. Cohn saw that sports fans enjoy getting sports team news on YouTube, too. His channel, dubbed “The Cohn Zone,” took off quickly, going from making $1,000 per month in January 2020 to $4,000 per month in ads by June 2020.
(YouTube has reported nearly $17 billion in ad revenue so far this year; the Alphabet-owned video service gives 55% of ad revenue generated by videos to content creators, and keeps the other 45%.)
“It was an incredibly heady feeling, considering I was making like [$2,000] a month, tops, at this newspaper where I wasn’t even a full-time employee,” Cohn said. “This [success] was all out of left field.”
Cohn said he makes between $15,000 per month talking Niners in the offseason, and up to $35,000 per month during the season. That shift, from borderline obscurity to big-time YouTuber, helped him and his wife buy a house in Oakland in 2022.
The majority of his monthly income, Cohn said, still comes from YouTube ads and “Super Chats,” where YouTube followers can submit questions to him while he’s streaming in exchange for a few bucks. He also has partnerships with digital betting parlors BetUs and Sleeper Picks — a move that’s grown increasingly common for YouTubers, as more states have made it easier to gamble on sports in recent years.
“Married to football”
Denver-based YouTuber Brandon Perna saw his channel, ThatsGoodSports, which offers football analysis with a comedic touch, enjoy its own meteoric rise post-pandemic. By 2020, he’d moved back to his hometown of Denver from Los Angeles, where he’d worked at Maker Studios, helping YouTubers make content.
He wanted to make a living on YouTube too, but he knew those early years would be tough. So Perna, while churning out content almost daily, started picking up freelance production work at local TV sports stations to make ends meet.
“I was always supplementing [my income] with side work,” Perna said.
His perseverance on YouTube paid off. Perna, whose channel started off primarily focused on his favorite team, the Denver Broncos, built a loyal following; that fanbase helped chip in a few thousand dollars each month on Perna’s Patreon account, which gave him the inspiration — and financial backing — to keep putting out football content.
And then he learned something: When bad things happen to your favorite team, it’s good for business. His Broncos traded for Super Bowl-winning quarterback Russell Wilson in 2022 — and missed the playoffs the next two seasons. The trade was a massive flop — but not for Perna’s viewership.
“The last two years I’ve had a ton of growth because the Wilson trade didn’t work out for the Broncos,” Perna said, laughing.
He has also seen his live streams — where viewers can watch him get worked up while watching the Broncos game for three hours — drive fan engagement.
“I learned people are much more entertained watching me suffer than being happy, and that’s a big reason why the live streams are so big,” Perna said. “The Broncos games [the past two years] have been a little bizarre, and some of the finishes have been exciting. So when you have that natural drama from a game, on top of being a fan, that’s when it all works.”
The Broncos haven’t had much success of late. But Perna’s ThatsGoodSports, which has expanded to covering the entire league, now has 641,000 subscribers and the channel’s content has been viewed more than 255 million times.
Perna has used his main channel to make sponsorship deals with companies like Manscaped, the male body hair trimmer, and Gametime, among others. He’s also started his own coffee company, Benchwarmer Brew, that sells an $18 “F*ck the Refs” bag of beans.
The creator didn’t offer specifics on how much the non-YouTube ads are bringing in, but he said “fan-funding is such a big part” of his overall operation. Perna said he makes $30,000-$40,000 per month altogether from his various revenue streams.
Like Cohn and Hollman, Perna said he’s essentially “married to football” for most of the week, with Saturday — “wife day,” as he calls it — set aside as his only day for not making content.
What’s clear from talking to all three creators is that there isn’t just one way to win talking football on YouTube.
For Perna, the fan-driven view of the game, pinched with comedy, has worked. For Kollmann, his easy-to-digest, stats-backed breakdowns of teams and players has worked. And Cohn’s secret sauce has been a willingness to give his unvarnished take on the state of the Niners — even when it isn’t complimentary.
Within three years it went from, ‘Oh, I’m making enough to pay rent on a one-bedroom apartment,’ to, ‘Oh, I can buy a house.’” — YouTuber Brett Kollmann
“A lot of content creators talking football on YouTube are afraid of blowback from fans of the team, so they gravitate towards being nice or optimistic,” Cohn said. “But I don’t think that necessarily works.”
His approach draws similarities to what Paul Giamatti, playing a radio programming director, said about Howard Stern’s show in “Private Parts”: His fans listen for 80 minutes a day, while his haters listened for 2.5 hours a day, because they wanted to hear what he said next.
“I get fans thinking, and I think I’m good at starting discussions,” Cohn said. “People want to hear what I have to say, whether they agree with it or not.”
From an audience standpoint, all three creators made a wise decision banking on football.
While leagues like the NBA have seen viewership wane, the NFL’s ratings continue to climb higher. This season’s opening night game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens (no doubt fueled by the presence of tight end Travis Kelce’s girlfriend, Taylor Swift) reached a peak audience of 55.6 million people, up 18% from last year.
For fans looking to jump into the content-making business themselves, Kollman uses a different sport to explain why it’s imperative to constantly pump out content.
“To young YouTubers of any genre, I always tell them, it’s a hockey stick curve: It’s a complete flatline and it feels like nothing’s going right, even though your videos are getting better over time,” he said. “And then you hit the blade of that hockey stick and [your views] just start spiking exponentially.”
That’s when the ad dollars and sponsorship bucks kick in.
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