Run your whole YouTube sponsorship playbook
with the team you have.
Find the right creators, vet them for real performance, buy at the right price, and prove what every dollar returned. ThoughtLeaders runs the whole workflow with you — a decade-tested methodology, seven years of YouTube data, and AI that does the heavy lifting. So a team of one operates like a sponsorship department.
Built for the brand team that runs YouTube sponsorships without a department behind it.
You buy the real kind of creator sponsorship. Flat fees, script approvals, send dates, creators in your inbox. Not Meta ads, not programmatic. Your team is small, sometimes it's just you, and you're spending six figures a year on judgment calls you have no good way to check.
That job — six figures of spend, no department behind it — is the job ThoughtLeaders was built around.
- → You spend $100k+ a year on YouTube and creator sponsorships.
- → Your team is small. Some days it's a team of one.
- → You've had a sponsorship flop and never found out why.
- → You want an agency's results without an agency's black box.
- → You'd rather see the data than take someone's word for it.
The way YouTube sponsorships get bought in 2026.
Every one of these is real. We pulled them from actual conversations with brand teams.
The Scraped-List Shotgun
You bought a scraped CSV of 2,000 'top fitness channels.' You're cold-emailing 200 of them hoping 5 reply. Half are brand accounts. A third are dead. One is a 2012 talk show clip.
→ A shortlist built from channels that already earned renewals — not a scraped CSV.
Vibes-Based CPM
The creator's manager says $15k. You have no idea if that's fair. You ask in Slack. Three people give three different answers. You guess and hope.
→ The channel's real deal history and a fair-price appraisal, in 30 seconds.
The Week-One Lie
Your attribution tool reports 'performance' based on the first 7 days. No one checks again. The 85% of views that show up in months 2–12 are never measured.
→ Every view counted, months after week one — measured, not assumed.
The Repeat Blind Spot
You booked $42k on three channels last quarter. Two delivered great results. You have no idea which two. Next quarter you book all three again anyway.
→ Renewal decisions made on real performance, not gut feel.
None of these are tooling problems. They're what happens when one person runs a department's job without the department.
Not an agency.
Not another dashboard.
Agencies hand you results without receipts — a campaign report and a "trust us." Tools hand you receipts without results — the data is yours, and so is all the work.
ThoughtLeaders is the third thing: we run your sponsorship program with you, on data nobody else has — and you can check every number we quote.
Five steps we published and refined for a decade. We run them with you.
Seven years of who sponsored whom — and who renewed.
11,537 channels that raised their hands. Deals land in the pipeline our own team books from.
Outreach, negotiation, contracts, payments — our people run the deal with you.
The transparency of a tool. The accountability of a team.
The playbook we spent a decade refining. Now your team runs it.
Five steps, from first shortlist to renewal. Each one used to take a sponsorship department. Now your team runs all five — our data and methodology, AI doing the heavy lifting, and our people when it counts.
Start from brands, not channels. We map your direct competitors and your Guide Brands™, companies with a proven track record of performance-driven YouTube sponsorships, and rank them by how closely their audience matches yours. Their campaigns become your shortcut: you see what already works before spending a dollar.
Find the channels that didn't just get sponsored, they got renewed. Our model detects brand mentions across transcripts, titles, and descriptions, separates paid from organic, and counts only true renewals, not bundle deals. A renewal is the market telling you a channel delivered.
Connect your Shopify or attribution data to your ThoughtLeaders spend and YouTube performance, and renewal decisions run on real ROI instead of views. A developer-education platform's growth team runs renewal decisions on this in production today.
Winners are a short list. We expand it algorithmically, finding channels with the same content, audience, and engagement signature as your proven winners, including creators your competitors haven't discovered yet. You widen the net without leaving the profile that works.
Turn a shortlist into conversations. Pull creator contact info and run outreach yourself, or place a deal straight into the ThoughtLeaders pipeline and our team handles outreach, negotiation, and view guarantees. Free to install, free to place a deal.
Is the price fair? Our sponsorship calculator gives an objective appraisal from our Projected Views algorithm, built on daily snapshots of how each channel's videos performed at 30 days old, then lets you weight it by what that audience is actually worth to your brand. When terms get negotiated, our team is at the table. You buy on value, not vibes.
The playbook covers the middle. We build the edges.
Sell on Shopify? We connect your sales data to your sponsorship spend and YouTube performance, and your renewal vetting runs on real ROI. Different stack, different problem? The workflows are custom by design. Bring us the problem, not a spec.
Same question. Same creator. Only one tool has the renewal history — at any speed.
Before
- — 47 browser tabs open
- — A Google Sheet with 412 rows of scraped channels
- — An 80-message Slack thread with your AM
- — A Notion doc titled "Q2 sponsorship ideas — FINAL v4"
- — A sticky note: "is $15k fair? ask eli tomorrow"
No idea if the price is fair. No data on repeat sponsorships. No visibility into the evergreen tail. You are guessing.
ScreenCrush · 2.1M subs · media entertainment ────────────────────────────────────────────── 58 tracked sponsorships · 44 repeat deals (76%) median deal: $4,161 · last 10: Fum 2026-03-25 $4,600 (×4 repeat) Snakzy 2026-02-05 $2,500 (×4 repeat) Send A Cake 2026-01-27 $3,666 (×3 repeat) Fum 2026-01-27 $4,596 (×3 repeat) ...
The query Claude ran ↓
tl db pg "
SELECT b.name, a.price, a.publish_date,
COUNT(*) OVER (PARTITION BY b.id) AS times_run
FROM thoughtleaders_adlink a
JOIN thoughtleaders_adspot s ON a.ad_spot_id = s.id
JOIN thoughtleaders_profile p ON a.creator_profile_id = p.id
JOIN thoughtleaders_profile_brands pb ON p.id = pb.profile_id
JOIN thoughtleaders_brand b ON pb.brand_id = b.id
WHERE s.channel_id = 12465 AND a.publish_status = 3
ORDER BY a.purchase_date DESC LIMIT 10 OFFSET 0" A 76% repeat rate and the median price in black and white. The speed is the bonus. The renewal history is the moat.
Every answer runs on data nobody else has.
The Brand Extractor
We process every brand mention in every video we track — transcripts, descriptions, on-screen — and classify each one: sponsored or organic. That's the engine behind every shortlist we build. Nobody else has it.
brand channels deals repeat avg ────────── ──────── ───── ────── ───── Surfshark 15 58 43 ← $775 NordVPN 9 9 0 ← $831 ProtonVPN 1 5 4 $3,000 CyberGhost 2 4 2 $1,325 ↳ Surfshark runs the strongest retention program in the category. NordVPN: 9 one-shots, zero repeats.
61,008 brand profiles
Every channel a brand has ever sponsored. Every organic mention. Every repeat. Every dollar figure we've observed across 7+ years. Your program runs on it — and you can query it yourself.
total_sponsorships: 55 first_deal: 2020-10-28 most_recent: 2025-08-19 unique_channels: 30 repeat_rate: 45.5% ← strong avg_deal_price: $1,583 recent_deals: • ScreenCrush $2,800 • Capt. Panda $600 • Forrest Kritzer $450 • Theme Park Express $340
The week-one lie, measured.
Remember the attribution tool that stops counting after 7 days? A YouTube integration keeps collecting views for months — the ad you paid for in January is still working in September. Measuring that tail honestly takes historical view snapshots at scale, for years. So we built it.
HBS & MIT Sloan researchers are building a case study on 7 years of this matched deal data.
evergreenness = (views_180d − views_30d)
────────────────────
views_30d
# longform avg: 2.29
# shorts avg: 0.68
# general knowledge longform: up to 12.3 Calculated daily over Firebolt's 7.4B-row article_metrics table.
"Anyone can copy a feature list. Nobody can copy seven years of who renewed whom."
Explore the full data moat →
Place the deal.
Our people take it from there.
Shortlist made, price checked — now it gets booked. A deal placed here lands in the same pipeline our own sales team works out of every day: we run the outreach, the negotiation, and the view guarantees, on two tiers of inventory that opted in to hear from us.
Creators who have raised their hand and said "yes, I'll take a sponsorship through ThoughtLeaders." Active inventory across every major YouTube category — gaming, finance, tech, lifestyle, education, entertainment.
6,173 channels joined MSN in the last 90 days alone — the network is more than doubling this year.
Hand-picked from thousands of monthly collaborations. These aren't channels with big numbers — they've passed a five-stage vetting funnel:
Place a TPP deal and a named account manager picks it up within 4 hours.
LEARN ABOUT TPP →- · outreach
- · negotiation
- · IOs & contracts
- · creator payments
- · draft QA
- · view guarantees
- · performance pulls
- · creator approvals
- · budget
- · final call on every deal
- · the same query keys we use
Every number your AM quotes, you can pull yourself with the same tools.
✓ Deal placed — free. → In the TL pipeline · our team takes it from here
Our own sales team works out of this same pipeline every day. It's not a demo — it's how we sell. And opted-in is the only inventory that survives the AI era: scraped contact lists are worthless, because everyone has them.
Both tiers, one pipeline — the same one your AM works out of.
You ask in English. Your AI agent does the typing.
Install the plugin, connect your account, and the questions on the right stop being research projects. That's how one marketer runs like a sponsorship department — and when a deal gets real, our people are already in the loop.
Install the Claude Code plugin and you're set up in one command — skills, slash commands, and the data connection included. Prefer Cursor or another agent? Anything that can run a command works too.
2 of 14 channels flagged
TechLinked → NordVPN 2026-05-12
LaterClips → Surfshark 2026-04-28 The SQL is public because the database isn't.
Run the playbook with us.
Tell us about your program and a human replies. Or add the Claude Code plugin and prove the data to yourself first, free — before you ever talk to us.