Partner with someone with a big audience. Sell them something that addresses their need. E.g. sell 1000 things for $2000 each, offer the influencer 50% and you keep 50%. No ad spend required, just a relationship leveraged and value delivered. Win win
That doesn't work.
If I have an audience of 50,000 people, that audience might be worth, say $5 per person per year.
If I'm really good at building offers and extracting the maximum value from my audience, I might be able to push that to $10 per person per year.
My audience is also someone elses audience. They aren't unique to me. They have limited time and/or money, so they aren't going to buy everything. I am competing with other people for their allocated yearly spend within whatever niche I'm in. Say, fitness..
Now, why would I work with some unknown person that has no idea how to make money and let them sell to my list and give them 50% for the privilege?
I get 50% less money than just building out my own products, and I weaken my list because there's a maximum extractable yearly value per person. I weaken it in several ways. Even if there's some sales, I only get half of what I'd have gotten if I'd built my own products, and I also hand over that person and they are now part of the other person's audience.
This is dreamland.
This was done more in the past when there was less competition and you could extract more value per year, and it was specifically done where you'd partner with big names who you knew were going to ADD value to your list in terms of prestige AND sell more than you could by yourself.
If Tony Robbins wants to mail to your list, you would be stupid to say no.
If the guy asking how to make $1m in 7 days with no work asks you to mail to your list, you would be stupid to say yes.
In fact, if just a regular guy with an offer asks this, you'd be stupid to say yes.
It's very easy to build your own offer. You can partner with someone to be the face of the offer by giving them 20% and you can hire copywriters and media buyers to push it. There's no reason to take on random people to hurt your audience.
The only way your approach works is if you're contacting influencers and asking for paid promotions/videos. This is different though. You aren't emailing a hot audience of buyers. You're just getting essentially an ad that performs better than an ad because it looks like it's non-promotional depending on the influencer and how they operate.