Why Youtubers Won't Review your Product

Once you have a popular youtube channel, lots of people start sending you mails asking you to promote their products.
Like if you have a gamer channel, gamedevs want you to review their game. Or if you run a popular cooking channel, you get lots of home appliance products to review.

"Here, have our game for free, now do a review!"

And then these people are wondering why youtubers are not reviewing their game or product.

Here is why:
It's not because youtubers get flooded by so many similar mails (they do). And that the product doesn't stand out enough. There is another reason:

Producing a good Youtube video takes depending on the quality of the video between one and three days (But can take much, much longer of course). Professional youtubers need to make sure that their audience likes the video so that the video at least makes back the money invested (=x days of work).

Adding a section into the video promoting a random product your audience is not interested in reduces the quality of the video from the point of view of the audience: They are annoyed, cancel watching the video, it reduces engagement, causes the youtube algorithm to stop showing the video to many people and so on. Resulting in the video bringing in less money and less subscribers.

So what's the solution to this?
To compensate for this, people wanting their product to be featured in a youtuber's video can do one simple thing: Pay the youtuber money. So that his loss is offset.

"But you get the product for free! You can keep it!"

That probably works if you have a very nice and expensive product the youtuber wants to keep. But the probability for this is very low. Having a product for free doesn't pay the bills. Money does.

There are still so many people out there thinking that it is an honor for youtubers to get the possibility to review their product for free. It's really strange. It maybe works for small or hobbyist youtubers (and it's great for them sometimes!), but approaching a larger one with requests like this is a bit odd at least.