New Report Finds Just 100 Brands Drive a Quarter of All YouTube Sponsorships, and 59% of Brands Have Fewer Than Ten Deals

Written by Daniel Moradkhani. Edited by Irfan Ahmad.

An index tracking over 367,994* detected sponsorships reveals a winner-take-most pattern in YouTube brand partnerships.

Most of the leading sponsors are brands familiar to people in the industry, and the average YouTube viewer will recognize them too. These are brands that sponsor creators in a bunch of different niches and have been doing so for the past couple of years consistently. The top 100 brands on YouTube account for 27% of all 367,994 detected sponsorships and the top 10% of brands are behind about 65% of them. The rest of the market is shared by the rest. Basically a winner-take-most market.

GetSponsored is a YouTube sponsorship database built by Stockholm based founder Daniel Moradkhani, tracking 13,944 brands across 25,485 channels. The way it works is it tracks descriptions across thousands of videos, finding out what videos are getting sponsored by what brands. Finding sponsors used to be quite a hassle for Moradkhani. He had to find competitors of his, open each one of their videos in a separate tab, look in their descriptions for links to brands, then do the entire process of finding contacts and pitching himself. So he built GetSponsored, putting it all in one easily manageable place.

"I was opening each video as a tab, looking through the descriptions for brand links, then searching LinkedIn and other sites for contact info for the right individuals," Moradkhani says.

The Brands That Sponsor the Most Creators Are Not the Biggest Companies

NordVPN being on top of the paid sponsorships with 2,150 detected placements across 305 creators won't come as a surprise to anyone.VPNs, specifically NordVPN, have been around for a very long time across tons of niches. Next is Squarespace with 1,831 across 192 creators, then StreamYard (1,441), Shopify (1,417) and finally Hostinger (1,233). BetterHelp, Insta360, Unacademy, Surfshark and Shopee round out the top ten, all somewhere between 1,000 and 1,250 placements. All of these brands are well known in the industry.

The commonality behind these brands is not the company size, instead it's the business model. Almost every single one of them sell some kind of subscription or direct response product where a discount code ties the sale back to a specific video for tracking.

Also read: The Sale That Never Ends in VPNs

Nord Security and Surfshark merged already in 2022 and Incogni is a Surfshark product. Together the three of them sit on roughly 4,000 detected placements. So three different VPN ads on three different channels is often the same parent company three times.

Reach and frequency are also something worth separating. BetterHelp has sponsored 359 different creators which is more than anyone else on the paid side, with 1,226 placements, about three per channel. Whereas Unacademy has almost the same amount of placements, 1,130, spread over just 73 creators, around fifteen per channel. This shows how some brands opt towards niching down when others go for a broader market. Two completely different strategies, one goes wide, one hits the same channels again and again.

Affiliate Links and Paid Campaigns Produce Two Different Leaderboards

Affiliate links are a factor that mildly skew the database. The most notable example of this is Epidemic Sound being the number one brand with 13,393 placements across 298 creators. That's almost as much as the entire paid top 10 combined. Next is Amazon with 8,366 across 352 creators, then Gamersupps (3,692) and Samsung (2,524), and after that a cluster of gaming and hardware brands all between roughly 1,000 and 1,350, Fortnite, Elgato, Epic Games, DJI, Instant Gaming and Apple.

Their reach is basically the same as NordVPN, 298 channels against 305, but they show up about 45 times per channel. NordVPN shows up seven.

"Affiliate links are usually placed across every single one of my videos to maximize revenue. When a brand pays for an integration, the maximal revenue gained is just from placing it in that one video the brand paid for," Moradkhani explains. Which is why brands like Epidemic Sound, who has a very well established affiliate program, lands on top of a lot of sponsorship databases. An affiliate link costs nothing to leave in, so two brands can have more or less the same relationship with the same amount of creators and end up around 11,000 placements apart anyway.

Technology Leads on Volume, VPNs Lead on Intensity

By category Technology is the biggest bucket, 100,662 tracked sponsorships across 1,805 brands. Lifestyle & Vlog comes second at 53,247 across 973 brands, then Entertainment (32,104), Gaming (31,554), Finance & Business (28,757), Beauty & Fashion (25,342) and Health & Fitness (15,260).

Part of this is just that the Technology label is wide. Software, hardware, apps, services, things that would be their own categories anywhere else.

Placements per brand tells a different story. Beauty & Fashion spreads its 25,342 placements across 799 brands, which is around 32 each. VPN & Privacy has 7,706 placements across just 37 brands, more than 200 each. That's the smallest amount of brands of any big category and by far the most active per brand, basically a handful of companies sponsoring at an industrial scale.

Education Apps Are the Fastest Risers While the Largest Paid Sponsors Pull Back

The last 30 days against the 30 before show some movement as well. Two Indian education platforms are the fastest risers, Adda247 grew 146 percent to 113 placements and Unacademy grew 16 percent to 115. In the same amount of time NordVPN appearances dropped about 35%. StreamYard dropped too, around 26%.

These are quite small numbers, low hundreds of placements against an index of 367,994, so this is probably campaign timing more than anything structural. But it does show that not even the heaviest sponsors spend at a constant rate. NordVPN can be number one in the entire index and still be the biggest faller in the same month.

Deal Volume Does Not Track Subscriber Count at the Top of the Index

Of the channels in the index, 823 are under 100K subscribers (3%), 18,311 are between 100K and 1M (72%) and 6,317 are above 1M (25%).

The most sponsored channel in the whole index is John Coogan with 453K subscribers, 796 sponsored videos from 30 different sponsors, more than channels several times his size.

300K viewers that all care about the same thing is a simpler buy than 3M viewers that came for all sorts of reasons. 59% of brands in the index have less than 10 sponsorships.

"From my own inbox it comes in waves. Subscription boxes for a while, then anime apps, then AI chat apps," Moradkhani says.

Methodology and Limitations

The numbers the database represents should be viewed as minimums. Sponsors that might have been removed from the description, exclusively mentioned in the video, or for any other reason not written in the description will not be caught by the detection system. However this is such a minor part of the ecosystem that it practically doesn't matter.

Almost all of the channels in the index are above 100K subscribers, and there are multiple reasons for this. For one, brands usually appear more often in well established channels rather than up and coming ones. "Second, scanning for channels has been done more thoroughly for larger channels. A decent chunk of smaller channels are still currently missing, but will be filled in in the future," Moradkhani says.

Since Epidemic Sound is a brand who has a very well known affiliate program and also does very little real paid advertising in comparison, labeling it as an affiliate brand is mostly correct. However for other brands such as Gamersupps or Samsung, it gets a bit foggier and isn't as accurate yet since the database doesn't verify link by link at this time.

The database started tracking around May 2026, pulling the 15 latest videos of around 74,000 channels, and has been updating daily since then. This potentially leaves a gap for channels who have consistently uploaded for years. Data will most likely deepen in the future.

* Figures are based on GetSponsored's index at the time of reporting and may change as the database continues to update.

About Author: Daniel Moradkhani is the founder of GetSponsored, a YouTube sponsorship database, and runs a network of YouTube channels with more than one billion total views. He is based in Stockholm.

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