Personally I don't plan to give a single cent of my hard earned money to any of these college athletes. I just don't see any personal benefit to me to buy any of their stuff or services like cameo and over the long haul if I did and looked back 10 years from now probably will find it foolish waste of my money. These kids already get a full ride scholarship, living expense stipend, free apparel, and all kinds of other benefits and free stuff as a student athlete. The top tier athletes that are going to profit the most from NIL are going to go pro and become millionaires anyways.
I work for a toy company designing toys and collectibles. Normally we do 99% TV and movie licensed toys, but the pandemic forced us to be creative with movies at a standstill and some of our customers like major theme parks and cinemas being closed.
One place we turned to was youtubers and social media celebrities. Guys who have 20 million people watch them play video games on a daily basis, guys who do random pranks, some cute pet that has 5 million followers. It was VERY hit or miss. All of these things seem really odd and desperate at first compared to say Spider-Man or Pixar, and some of them did flame out and come to nothing...but a few of them moved product in the same way a mid tier movie license does without having to pay the gigantic licensing fee to a movie studio.
I'm on the fence if it's worth trying to come up with some sort of manufactured/tooled collectible or toy for college basketball/football players to slap their likeness on. I'm sure for some of them it could be a winner, but for many it's just not going to be worth it. For a company like mine the upside is no massive licensing fee like NBA/NFL/MLB or Warner Brothers or Disney. The downside is dealing with individuals or individuals and an agent means you're going through a lot of things for the first time vs a company that has done licensing for decades.
The route a famous college athlete should all go is print-on-demand that has built in automated fulfillment. Hire an illustrator to do a bunch of art, hire someone else to run any additional business issues. Slap it on 100-200 items that print on demand. Profit. Athletes that get very personally involved in this are going to see their game suffer because it's a lot of hours if you're trying to max it out. If they can scrape together the money to hire 2-3 qualified people to do it, and then completely ignore the people doing it, it's a great opportunity for them. Otherwise they could just take the really easy stuff like appearances and forget about merch.
I'm guessing there will be firms that try to do something like this...I'd think about it myself but my experience doing it with social media stars that have 3-20 million followers makes me go back and forth. Basically I'm ready to go back to dealing with big licenses now that covid is passing.
