Before you book a YouTube channel, check which sponsors came back

Every sponsored YouTube channel has a list of brands that tried it. That list is easy to fake your way through: a channel can run forty sponsors in a year and still not work for any of them. What’s much harder to fake is a brand paying for the same channel again months later, after it has seen the results.

Renewals are the cheapest performance data on YouTube, and they’re public if you know where to look. This post shows what a normal renewal rate looks like, how to read one, and how to check it on any channel before you book, with real numbers from October 18, 2026.

What a renewal rate measures

A channel’s renewal rate is the share of its sponsors that came back. In ThoughtLeaders it counts:

• Brands that sponsored the channel’s long-form videos in the last 12 months. Shorts aren’t counted.
• A renewal is a brand sponsoring again 60 to 365 days after an earlier sponsorship. Videos less than 60 days apart count as one booking, so a three-video bundle is one decision, not three.
• The rate is renewed brands divided by all sponsoring brands. A channel with 20 sponsors, 5 of which came back, has a 25% renewal rate.

It is the same number in the Chrome extension, the web app and the CLI, and it is one of the inputs to the channel’s fair-value price estimate.

What’s a good renewal rate?

We looked at every YouTube channel that ran long-form sponsorships from at least 5 different brands between October 18, 2025 and October 17, 2026. That’s 37,266 channels.

• The median channel’s renewal rate is 21%. About one sponsor in five came back.
• The top quarter starts at 40%, and the top tenth at 60%.
• The bottom quarter is at 9% or less, and 20% of channels had no sponsor come back at all.

Size barely moves it. From 10K subscribers up, the typical rate drifts down a little as channels get bigger, and the smallest channels sit lower too:

So 40% puts a channel in or near the top quarter in every size band, and more subscribers don’t come with a higher typical renewal rate. Subscriber count measures reach. Renewal rate shows whether brands that paid for that reach chose to pay again.

How we measured it: each channel’s renewal rate as stored in ThoughtLeaders on October 18, 2026, built from sponsorships we detected in long-form videos. Detection isn’t exhaustive, so a missed sponsorship can move a channel’s rate either way. Treat the percentiles as a guide, not a grading scale.

Two channels, two very different rates

Here are two channels of about the same size, neither of them ThoughtLeaders partners, as ThoughtLeaders read them on October 18, 2026.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich (1.14M subscribers, personal finance) had a renewal rate of 53%, well inside the top quarter. Of the 35 brands we detected sponsoring its long-form videos over the past year, 18 came back. Three of them were there almost all year:

That’s the pattern you want to see: several brands that kept paying for a year, and that are still there this month. (The 53% is the live figure in ThoughtLeaders. Our brand-by-brand count on the same day found 18 of 35, so the two don’t divide exactly.)

Kenji Explains (971K subscribers, Excel and productivity) had a renewal rate of 11%, about half the typical channel’s. Read as a number, that looks weak. Read as a list, it says something more useful. Nine brands sponsored it in the past year. Eight were one-off sponsorships, mostly AI and productivity apps trying the channel once. The ninth, HubSpot, sponsored 14 videos, from November 2025 to October 2026, and kept coming back all year.

If you sell to people who live in spreadsheets, that one brand is strong evidence. A B2B software brand found the channel worth booking again and again for a year. The 11% mostly tells you that a lot of new apps are testing the channel, and that’s a reason to ask how those reads went, not a reason to walk away.

How to read a renewal rate

1. Compare it to the typical channel, not to 100%. 21% is the median. 40% or more is the top quarter. No channel keeps every sponsor, and many sponsors are brands testing YouTube for the first time.
2. Check the denominator. With 9 sponsors, one renewal moves the rate by 11 points. Among channels with 5 to 9 sponsors, 30% had none come back, often just because they haven’t had many chances. With fewer than about 10 sponsors, read the list, not the rate.
3. Look at who came back. A renewal from a brand like yours (similar price point, audience and business model) is worth more than a high rate built on brands nothing like you. This is the same idea as picking a guide brand: Which YouTube creators does your competitor sponsor?
4. Check that they’re still there. A renewal rate covers twelve months. If every brand that renewed stopped six months ago, something changed. Look at the date of each brand’s last sponsored video.
5. Treat it as evidence, not proof of ROI. We can see that a brand came back. We can’t see its sales. A renewal is a strong public signal that the channel worked for someone, which is more than a media kit can tell you.
6. Open the videos before you count them. Detection can misread a mention, especially on news and review channels that talk about companies they cover. If a “sponsor” looks odd for the channel, watch the read.

Check it on any channel

On YouTube. Open any channel with the ThoughtLeaders Chrome extension. The Top sponsors panel shows the channel’s renewal rate next to the brands it has mentioned, each marked sponsored or organic. Each video also shows the sponsors detected in it, so you can open the read itself.

With your AI agent. With the ThoughtLeaders CLI connected, ask in plain words:

Which brands sponsored Kenji Explains more than once in the last year, and when was each one’s last sponsored video?

Your agent resolves the channel, pulls its sponsored long-form videos from ThoughtLeaders, and groups them by brand with the 60-day rule, which is how we built the tables above. Ask it to do the same for every channel on your shortlist and you get a renewal check in one pass:

For each channel on this list, give me the renewal rate, how many brands sponsored it in the past year, and which ones came back.

Where it fits in a buy

Renewals are the second step in the method ThoughtLeaders has used to buy YouTube sponsorships since 2018. Find brands like yours, see which channels they keep renewing, expand to look-alikes, then decide on value, not price:

• Find the channels your guide brand keeps renewing: Which YouTube creators does your competitor sponsor?
• Expand a winner into look-alikes: Find more channels like one that worked
• Check the quote before you sign: How to check a YouTube sponsorship quote with your AI assistant

One more thing to keep in mind when you compare channels: YouTube changed how it counts public views on August 24, 2026. Renewal rates don’t depend on view counts, so they aren’t affected, but any views or CPM you compare next to them are. Compare views at the same video age and on the same counting rule.

Try it on your shortlist

Add the Chrome extension and open the Top sponsors panel on the next channel you’re considering. Or install the CLI and ask your agent which of your shortlisted channels brands keep coming back to.