• Rachel Maeng Brown is a former NCAA rower who now works with student-athletes at her firm Gen Agency.
• The agency has provided NIL education and consulting to college athletes, collectives, and schools.
• Brown shared a presentation with five strategies to help athletes price and negotiate brand deals.

Knowing your worth is a struggle many college athletes face now that they can make money from their name, image, and likeness, known as NIL.

To help athletes understand their value, influencer-marketing-and-production company Gen Agency has been educating and consulting college athletes on NIL.

"Our big focus is creating a sustainable NIL marketplace at each university," Rachel Maeng Brown, the founder and CEO of Gen agency, told Business Insider.

Brown, a former NCAA rower, said the NIL side of Gen Agency educates universities to help them build curriculums. The agency also offers athletes on-site and virtual workshops about NIL marketing.

In April, Gen Agency hosted its first NIL-educational summit for University of Michigan influencers in partnership with Reach, a student-driven organization helping content creators grow their platforms and connect with brands. The presentation, which was shared with BI, covered how athletes can understand their audience, price sponsored content, post properly on social media, and protect themselves with a contract.

The summit also featured a panel of guest speakers, including former NFL player Isaiah Johnson. Johnson told BI that social-media followers and engagement are more important to brands who work with athletes than on-field performance.

"Followers, everyone wants to know how many people are following you and then two, just how genuine you are," he said. "If you are genuinely using a product, this could be a wonderful fit."

Johnson said athletes with the best media presence are natural and real with their followers. He said sports fans love behind-the-scenes footage they can not get from somewhere else, like athletes' day-in-the-life videos.

Here are five key slides from Gen Agency's NIL presentation on how athletes can brand themselves and negotiate fair pay:

Learn about your audience

Brown said knowing your target audience is key to working with brands. It helps companies understand who they can reach by recruiting you. 

During the summit, Brown showed athletes where to find key stats on their Instagram audiences, including follower count and growth, location, age, and gender.

A formula athletes can use to estimate the price of a brand deal

The presentation offered a formula student-athletes can use to calculate how much to charge brands for a sponsored post. It's based on a $10 CPM, which refers to the cost per every 1,000 impressions, though CPMs can vary.

To calculate what to charge per post, take the average number of views over the last 30 days and divide it by 1,000. Then take that figure and multiply it by the CPM.

Using that math, an athlete with 600,000 average views over the last days would charge $6,000 per post, based on a $10 CPM, per the presentation's example.

Know your copyright rules

Athletes, like other influencers, need to comply with brand, platform, and regulatory guidelines for social-media posts and ads, such as copyright rules and what kind of content is permitted on a platform.

Student-athletes also need to abide by NCAA rules because posting inappropriate content can result in losing scholarships, eligibility, and future career opportunities, according to the NCAA.

Brown said college athletes should also exercise caution and not include other brands or anything illegal in a sponsored post. She advised double-checking the spelling before posting, too.

Dos and don'ts for sponsored posts

The agency also emphasized the importance of double-checking disclosures for paid ads, partnerships, and more so athletes do not have to delete or redo sponsored videos.

"This is really important to student-athletes as well as smaller influencers because a lot of brands will try to bully them," said Brown, "to say, 'You don't need to put hashtag. You don't need to disclose that we're sponsored.' But it's actually illegal across social media."

She said failing to disclose a sponsored post could result in an athlete's account being banned or messing up their average views and algorithm.

Things to know about payment

Brown also talked about contracts and W-9s, which are tax forms for independent contractors. The presentation emphasized in capital letters that athletes need a contract to make sure they get paid for their work.

They should also be mindful of terms such as "usage" and "ownership" because it could mean their videos could be posted on any social-media channel or site.

Brown said brands are not going to protect the athletes, so they need to look out for themselves.

• Planet Fitness is hiking the price of its Classic Card membership plan by 50% to $15 a month.
• It had held the price at $10 for 26 years, which would be worth around $19 in today's money.
• The price increase will be introduced in the summer and will only apply to new members.

Planet Fitness is hiking the price of its basic membership plan by 50% after holding it at $10 a month for 26 years.

The new $15 charge will come into effect in the summer and will only apply to new members, interim CEO Craig Benson told investors Thursday. Current members on $10-a-month plans won't be affected by the change, CFO Thomas Fitzgerald said.

The price is for Planet Fitness's Classic Card, which gives users unlimited access to one gym.

Benson said that Planet Fitness had started testing $12.99 and $15 price points in the fall. The $15 fee drove the biggest increase in average revenues per gym "with the least impact to the rate of joins," he said.

Planet Fitness isn't the only company to ditch its trademark price point as inflation pushes up how much businesses pay for staff, goods, and overheads. Dollar stores have been dropping their $1 price point and fast-food chains have been charging customers more.

"Our Classic Card membership has been priced at $10 since 1998, which based on inflation would be about $20 in today's dollars," Fitzgerald said. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator, $10 in January 1998 would have the same buying power as $19.33 in March 2024.

But it will take a while for the benefits of the price change to trickle through and boost gym margins because it only applies to new members, Fitzgerald said.

He also noted that the majority of Planet Fitness's members — about 62% — had its Black Card membership, which is more expensive and allows them to bring a guest, use any of its gyms, and access some other facilities like tanning and massage chairs.

Around the time that the new Classic Card price is introduced, Planet Fitness will start testing new prices for the Black Card, Benson said. The last time its price was increased was in May 2022, Fitzgerald said.

As part of the Classic Card price change, Planet Fitness plans to focus more heavily on its "price for life" policy, Benson said.

"We ought to get the benefit of a subscription-based business that doesn't change pricing on people in the middle of their usage of those services," he said.

Former CEO Chris Rondeau was abruptly fired in September.

Planet Fitness said that at the end of March it had about 19.6 million members and more than 2,500 gyms worldwide. It reported an 11.6% increase in first-quarter total revenue to $248 million and a 6.2% increase in system-wide same-store sales.

But results were hit by a number of headwinds, including consumers focusing on saving money, concerns about COVID-19 infections and other illnesses, and an advertising campaign that Benson said "may not have resonated as broadly as we had anticipated."

• Googlers have been grilling executives about compensation, CNBC reported.
• In April, Alphabet reported triumphant first-quarter earnings that surpassed analysts' estimates.
• One employee claimed they had noticed "a significant decline in morale."

Google execs have been facing tough questions from employees after the company reported blowout earnings last month.

In April, Alphabet reported triumphant first-quarter earnings that surpassed analysts' estimates and sent the stock soaring. The company reported a year-on-year revenue increase of about 15% and issued its first dividend of 20 cents a share.

Googlers wanted to know why the revenue boost wasn't leading to higher pay or an end to some of the company's cost-cutting measures, CNBC reported.

One comment posted on an internal forum before the meeting claimed there was "a significant decline in morale, increased distrust, and a disconnect between leadership and the workforce."

Another top-rated question reviewed by CNBC asked why Googlers had not received "meaningful compensation increases" despite the "company's stellar performance and record earnings."

In an all-hands meeting with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and other top execs, Google's CFO Ruth Porat reportedly addressed some of the workers' comments. She said the company's priority was to "invest in growth," noting that "revenue should be growing faster than expenses," the report said.

Pichai reportedly followed up with a joke about holding a "Finance 101" TED Talk for employees.

Google representatives did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment, which was made outside normal working hours.

However, a Google spokesperson told CNBC most employees would receive a pay raise this year, including equity grants and bonuses.

Google execs have been fielding tough questions and employee criticism over the last year.

The company cut about 12,000 people in 2023 and started off 2024 with thousands more laid off from core engineering and hardware teams.

The rolling layoffs have angered employees — with some lashing out at leadership. Following a round of layoffs in January, some Googlers took public aim at what they described as "glassy-eyed leaders" and organized protests in response.

During the all-hands, Pichai told workers the company had hired too much staff during the pandemic, per CNBC.

"We hired a lot of employees, and from there, we have had course correction," he said.

• Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson said Chinese automakers are still "years behind" Tesla on EV technology. 
• He told a Financial Times conference that car companies should not "underestimate" Chinese firms.
• Companies such as BYD are now challenging Tesla in China after years of rapid growth.

Chinese EV makers are challenging Tesla — but one of the company's rivals still thinks they're years away from overtaking Elon Musk's firm in one respect.

Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson said that despite their success, Chinese automakers are still some distance behind Tesla when it comes to the underlying technology that powers EVs — but warned that they could catch up quickly.

"If you look at the advance in core EV technology, they're still years and years behind Tesla," said Rawlinson told the Financial Times' Future of the Car Summit in London this week.

The former Tesla engineer said that Chinese EVs had progressed "immeasurably" in recent years, and were now superior to their western counterparts "in terms of fit and finish quality." However, Rawlinson thought their engineering was still lacking.

"In terms of the elegance of their drive train technology, the batteries, the way things are integrated … it's not even close," he said.

"I was looking at a number of the units on display at the Geneva Motor Show and the engineering was very disappointing."

However, Rawlinson warned that Western car makers must not "underestimate" the ability of their Chinese rivals to quickly catch up on core EV technology.

"We underestimated the Chinese ability to make good cars. They're shockingly good. They're a lot better than they've been. They're just not quite there yet," he said.

Western automakers have come under increasing pressure in China from domestic manufacturers that have grown rapidly in recent years. Warren Buffett-backed BYD overtook Tesla as the world's largest EV manufacturer in the last three months of 2023.

After once laughing off Tesla's Chinese rivals, Musk now seems a lot more worried, telling investors that Chinese EVs are likely to "demolish" the competition if trade barriers aren't put in place.

Like other EV startups such as Fisker and Rivian, Lucid has borne the brunt of stuttering demand for electric vehicles in the US.

The company has slashed prices on its high-end Lucid Air sedan to compete with Tesla, and produced less than 10,000 vehicles last year.

However, its backing from the Saudi Public Investment Fund means there is little risk of Lucid running out of money anytime soon, unlike some of its rivals.

The company is also preparing for the launch of its Gravity SUV that boasts a Tesla-beating range of 440 miles and is expected to cost less than $80,000.

Lucid did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.