YouTube sponsorship market: October 2026 update
One in 16 new long-form YouTube videos we scanned carries a detected sponsorship, up from one in 21 a year ago. Our October 2026 read on the YouTube sponsorship market: volume, the top brands, who is growing fastest, the busiest categories and what sponsored channels are projected to get per video.
Most “creator economy news” is a funding round or a survey. This page is the opposite: a monthly count of what brands actually did on YouTube, read from the videos themselves. ThoughtLeaders scans new uploads for sponsor reads, so every number below is a detected sponsored video: a video where our detection flagged a sponsor-style read for a brand (an integration, an ad read, a creator code). We don’t see contracts or payments, so it is a measure of activity, not of spend.
Corrected October 17, 2026: this page now excludes the Locked On podcast network. Its channels use dynamic ad insertion, which stamps the same ad reads across hundreds of shows, so its detections are not individually booked sponsorships. The correction changed the top 10, the fastest-growing list and the Sports figures; details under “How we counted”.
All figures were pulled on October 15, 2026. “Last 30 days” means videos published September 15 to October 14, 2026. “Prior 30 days” is August 16 to September 14, 2026, and “a year ago” is September 15 to October 14, 2025. We update this page every month.
October 2026 in one paragraph
Sponsorship density on long-form YouTube is rising. Of the 2.9 million long-form uploads we scanned in the last 30 days, 176,686 carried a detected sponsorship, or 6.1%. That is up from 5.9% in the prior 30 days and 4.8% in the same window last year. Prediction markets are the story of the month: Kalshi is now the third most-detected sponsor in the videos we track, with 2,957 sponsored videos, against 174 in the same window a year ago, and Polymarket more than doubled month over month to enter the top 10. Epic Games leads the list with 4,466.
Sponsored-video volume
| Format | Last 30 days | Prior 30 days | A year ago |
|---|---|---|---|
| Long-form: sponsored videos | 176,686 | 165,329 | 171,854 |
| Long-form: share of scanned uploads | 6.1% | 5.9% | 4.8% |
| Live: sponsored videos | 28,355 | 25,542 | 35,298 |
| Live: share of scanned uploads | 4.9% | 4.5% | 5.6% |
Data pulled 2026-10-15. Detected sponsored videos, not spend.
Compare the shares, not the raw counts, across years. The number of videos we track per month changes as channels are added and dropped, so the share of scanned uploads carrying a sponsor is the better comparison, though not a perfect one, since the mix of channels changes too. On that basis, long-form went from about one sponsored video in 21 to one in 16 in a year. Live streams moved the other way.
About 39,400 channels ran at least one detected sponsorship in a long-form video in the last 30 days, roughly level with the prior 30 days.
Top 10 brands by detected sponsored videos
Long-form and live videos, last 30 days. “Channels” is the number of distinct channels that ran the brand.
| # | Brand | Sponsored videos | Channels | vs prior 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Epic Games | 4,466 | 446 | +44% |
| 2 | GamerSupps | 3,288 | 415 | about flat |
| 3 | Kalshi | 2,957 | 230 | +57% |
| 4 | Epidemic Sound | 2,477 | 891 | +13% |
| 5 | NordVPN | 2,113 | 337 | -6% |
| 6 | GFUEL | 1,695 | 161 | about flat |
| 7 | SeatGeek | 1,626 | 198 | +20% |
| 8 | WhatNot | 1,584 | 356 | +10% |
| 9 | Chapter | 1,283 | 101 | +19% |
| 10 | Polymarket | 1,202 | 94 | +137% |
Data pulled 2026-10-15. Detected sponsored videos, not spend.
Two ways to read this list without fooling yourself:
- Videos and channels tell different stories. Chapter and Polymarket reach this list on about 100 channels each, which run them many times. Epidemic Sound is spread across 891 channels with a few videos each. A brand’s channel count is closer to the size of its creator roster; its video count is closer to its share of voice.
- Creator programs count. Epic Games and Epidemic Sound run programs where creators mention them in many videos (creator codes, music credits). Our detection counts any sponsor-style read, paid or not, so brands with always-on creator programs rank high next to brands that book one-off integrations.
Read the vs-prior column with care. Brand matching runs behind detection: 47% of last-30-day sponsored videos still had at least one sponsor not yet matched to a brand record, against 28% for the prior 30 days. Some of this month’s videos for any brand may not be counted yet.
Fastest-growing brands
Highlights among brands with at least 150 detected sponsored videos in the last 30 days, at least 50 in the prior 30, and at least 10 channels:
- Sony Pictures Entertainment: 401 videos, up from 75 (5.3x), on 35 channels. The biggest multiple among brands that qualified.
- Creator gear and phones, all at once: RODE (398, 3.0x), Neewer (188, 2.6x), Canon (249, 2.5x), Anker (319, 2.4x), Sony (613, 2.3x), DJI (752, 2.2x), OnePlus (170, 2.7x) and Oppo (258, 2.2x).
- The Daily Wire: 216, up from 75 (2.9x), on 13 channels.
- Bluesky: 243, up from 98 (2.5x), on 59 channels.
- Polymarket: 1,202, up from 507 (2.4x). Kalshi and Polymarket together logged more than 4,100 sponsor detections in one month.
New sponsors: very few are new
We took every brand with at least 5 detected sponsored videos on at least 3 channels in the last 30 days: 4,977 brands. Then we checked whether each one had any detected sponsorship in the 24 months before. All but 4 did. This counts only brands already matched to a brand record and above those thresholds, so it is a floor, not a census of newcomers.
The newly detected brands (no detection in the previous 24 months) are small: Bitbase (13 videos on 9 channels), CSDeals (7 on 7) and Greenland Mines (6 on 6). A fourth match is held back until we can confirm which company it is.
The point for a buyer: the YouTube sponsorship market is a repeat-buyer market. Among established sponsors, the brands you’re competing with for a creator’s next slot have almost all been there before. That also means their history is public, which is exactly what makes finding your competitor’s repeat channels work.
(Brand-new advertisers are the ones most likely to sit in the not-yet-matched pile for a few weeks, so this undercounts first-timers. Even so, among brands active at any scale, repeat sponsors dominate.)
Content categories with the most sponsorship activity
Long-form only, by ThoughtLeaders’ channel category. Share is the percentage of scanned uploads in that category with a detected sponsor.
| Category | Sponsored videos, last 30 days | Share, last 30 days | Share, prior 30 days | Share, a year ago |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gaming | 37,093 | 8.6% | 8.1% | 6.2% |
| Lifestyle | 30,997 | 4.9% | 5.0% | 3.8% |
| Technology | 21,888 | 12.2% | 12.0% | 11.2% |
| How To & Crafts | 18,724 | 13.8% | 13.1% | 10.6% |
| Sports | 18,440 | 9.1% | 8.4% | 6.6% |
| General Knowledge | 17,005 | 7.6% | 8.0% | 6.7% |
| Entertainment | 10,422 | 2.8% | 2.8% | 2.3% |
| Music | 7,077 | 3.0% | 3.0% | 2.0% |
| News & Politics | 6,458 | 1.9% | 1.8% | 1.2% |
| Food | 5,191 | 5.2% | 5.2% | 4.5% |
| Health & Fitness | 2,018 | 15.0% | 13.9% | 11.1% |
Data pulled 2026-10-15. Detected sponsored videos, not spend.
- Gaming is the biggest market by volume, and its density rose from 6.2% to 8.6% in a year.
- The biggest gains in sponsorship share were Health & Fitness (+3.9 points year over year), How To & Crafts (+3.2) and Sports (+2.5). Sports also gained more than half a point in one month.
- The most saturated categories are Health & Fitness, How To & Crafts and Technology, where one long-form video in 7 or 8 carries a sponsor. In Entertainment and News & Politics, fewer than one in 30 does, so far more of what gets published there goes out with no sponsor at all.
What a sponsored channel’s next video is projected to get
For channels that ran at least one detected sponsorship in a long-form video in the last 30 days, here is each channel’s projected views for its next long-form video (what a new video is expected to reach at day 30), by subscriber band. Medians, with the middle half of channels in brackets.
| Channel size (subscribers) | Channels in sample | Median projected views | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 100K | 2,855 | about 2,600 | 420 to 8,100 |
| 100K to 500K | 1,779 | about 18,000 | 6,100 to 48,000 |
| 500K to 1M | 477 | about 48,000 | 12,700 to 119,000 |
| 1M to 5M | 447 | about 89,000 | 24,000 to 214,000 |
| 5M and up | 77 | about 330,000 | 83,000 to 893,000 |
Data pulled 2026-10-15, from a random sample of 6,000 of the 39,356 channels, less 19 Locked On channels (5,635 had a projection).
The pattern buyers keep relearning: subscribers overstate reach. The median sponsored channel with 500K to 1M subscribers is projected to get about 48,000 views on a new video. And the middle half of each band spans roughly 8 to 19 times from bottom to top, so a subscriber count tells you little about a specific channel. To see what that means for price, read what brands actually paid by channel size, and before you sign anything, check the quote you got.
A note on the view basis: YouTube changed how public views are counted on August 24, 2026, and projections are built from day-30 views of videos published over the last few months. Some of those views were counted the old way and some the new way, so treat these as current projections, not as numbers comparable with older reports.
Shorts: what we can and can’t see
Shorts were 44% of all uploads we tracked in the last 30 days. Our sponsor detection currently runs on long-form and live videos, not on Shorts, so this report does not estimate how many Shorts carry a sponsorship. That’s not the same as zero: brands do buy Shorts. If you’re comparing Shorts offers, judge them on Shorts projected views, which ThoughtLeaders projects separately from long-form.
Run this for your category
Everything above came from public sponsor detections you can query yourself. With the ThoughtLeaders CLI connected to your AI agent, paste any of these prompts and swap in your category or brand:
Which brands sponsored the most long-form YouTube videos in gaming in the last 30 days, and how does each compare with the 30 days before? Use detected sponsorships only, and show the number of channels per brand.
Which brands sponsored YouTube videos about personal finance in the last 30 days that had no detected sponsorship in the two years before?
Show me the monthly count of detected sponsored videos for Kalshi and Polymarket over the last 12 months.
Which channels has Epidemic Sound renewed, sponsoring them again at least 60 days after an earlier sponsorship? Rank them by number of repeat sponsorships.
For channels between 100K and 500K subscribers that ran a detected sponsorship in a tech video this month, what are the median projected views per long-form video?
Or run the monthly trend for one brand directly. Find the brand’s id, then count its sponsored videos per month:
tl brands find "Kalshi"
tl db es '{"size":0,"query":{"bool":{"filter":[{"term":{"doc_type":"article"}},{"terms":{"content_type":["longform","live"]}},{"term":{"sponsored_brand_mentions":29254}},{"range":{"publication_date":{"gte":"2025-10-01"}}}]}},"aggs":{"m":{"date_histogram":{"field":"publication_date","calendar_interval":"month"}}}}'To check a single channel instead, add the Chrome extension and open the Top sponsors panel on its YouTube page.
How we counted
- Source: public YouTube uploads tracked by ThoughtLeaders, scanned for sponsor reads. No deal, proposal or pricing data from ThoughtLeaders’ own marketplace is used on this page, and a brand appearing here says nothing about whether it works with us.
- Windows: by video publish date. Last 30 days = September 15 to October 14, 2026; prior 30 days = August 16 to September 14, 2026; a year ago = September 15 to October 14, 2025.
- Exclusions: the Locked On podcast network (292 channels) is left out of every figure. Its shows use dynamic ad insertion, so one ad buy appears as a “sponsored” read across hundreds of videos and old episodes at once. Before this correction it accounted for most of FanDuel, Gametime and Indeed’s detections, and for the apparent surges of ButcherBox and Gameday Men’s Health.
- Counting: a video counts once per brand, however many times the brand is read. Brand totals cover long-form and live; category and size-band figures cover long-form only.
- Matching lag: sponsors not yet matched to a brand record are left out of brand lists (47% of last-30-day sponsored videos had at least one, 28% for the prior 30 days, 15% a year ago).
- Typical values are medians. Projected views are each channel’s day-30 projection for a new long-form video.
- Data pulled October 15, 2026. Next update: mid-November 2026.