From the CEO: How & Why We Paid Athletes $100,000 in November

From the CEO: How & Why We Paid Athletes $100,000 in November

This post was written Steven Farag, Campus Ink Co-Founder & CEO, and posted on his LinkedIn. 

Yesterday, Campus Ink's NIL Store crossed a new milestone by paying athletes $100,000 in a given month, heavily generated by sales during the Cyber season. While we often celebrate different company sales milestones, our NILNorthStar remains to make athletes as much money as possible.

Through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we made the intentional decision that revenue shared with the athlete would remain untouched and unaffected by discounts and deals. While most DTC brands are loaded up on FB ads, our ad spend remains close to zero and we instead direct that money into our athlete's pockets.

Each morning our Slack channel has a company-wide ticker letting us know exactly how each NIL program performed the night before. This channel has inadvertently become our most-viewed channel since teammates are eager to see how their work with athletes converts into revenue. Our teams live in the data and take an immense amount of pride in knowing their work is really paying off.

While we encourage our athletes to post and re-share their merch, our teams work in their backcourt by marketing on their behalf. The CI team knows they are extremely busy and we don't force athletes to use affiliate links and track referrals. We are committed to profit sharing on each item sold. When our priorities align and athletes know we share a deep understanding of their goals, a trusted partnership is formed.

Athletes and agents have a live dashboard to see their earnings and sales attribution. They can see transaction data and know how much they earned on each product sold. They know when their next paycheck is coming. Today we pay out athletes every two weeks, and we're still not satisfied with that speed. A 20-year-old does not get excited about a lousy percentage of a percentage paid out every quarter or six months. We feel good knowing our work generates substantial earnings for the athletes and remain relentless in this pursuit.

Unfortunately, this is not the standard or shared vision in the NIL space. Few really know how much college athletes are actually making and sadly, some leaders in the space tell us it's irrelevant. This is when power, personal interest, control, and politics suffocate the spirit of NIL. While we still experience it every day, attitudes and willingness to change are slowly turning. Those that I interact with daily, know I challenge decision-makers on all sides of the table openly and directly about this. It often makes for quite an uncomfortable, awkward but needed conversation.

Our numbers tell a convincing story and my hope is that we continue to see the industry holding themselves to a higher standard.

Congrats to the Campus Ink team, you continue to amaze me!

 

###

Back to blog