YouTube sponsorship cost by niche: what brands paid per 1,000 views in 19 niches

A YouTube view isn’t worth the same to every brand. Put a price against the views a channel is expected to deliver and some niches cost far more than others. But much of that gap is not the niche at all. It is channel size: small channels cost more per view, and some niches are mostly small channels.

We measured both from the sponsorships brands actually bought through ThoughtLeaders. This post breaks 9,098 of them into 19 buyer niches, shows what brands paid per 1,000 projected views in each, and then adjusts for channel size so you can see how much of the gap is left. It ends with what YouTube’s August view count change does to every number here. Data pulled October 27, 2026.

Price per 1,000 projected views, by niche

These are sold YouTube integrations (a mention inside a creator’s video), scheduled between August 24, 2024 and August 23, 2026 and bought before YouTube changed its view count. We dropped deals with no price and one network we exclude for data-quality reasons. The cost per 1,000 projected views divides the price by the views the channel was expected to reach at day 30 when the deal was sold. Across all 7,239 deals with a projection, the median was $24, and the middle half ran from $16 to $40.

The last column is the size index. For every deal we divide its price per view by the median for channels of the same projected size (the bands in the next section), then take the median across the niche. It is a coarse adjustment: each band is wide, and size is not the only thing that moves price. 1.00 means the niche paid what any channel that size typically sold for. 2.00 means twice that.

The cost-per-view columns use only deals with a recorded projection of at least 1,000 views (the n in brackets). * Thin row: under 100 such deals or under 40 channels. Read those medians as a rough guide; Beauty & fashion rests on 80 deals from 33 channels.

What the size index changes

• Beauty & fashion’s $101 is partly a small-channel price. Almost all of its deals were on channels projected under 50,000 views, where every niche costs more per view. Size-adjusted it is still the most expensive niche, at 2.73 times typical, but on a thin sample.
• Finance is pricier than its median looks. At $45, Personal finance & investing sits below Business & careers ($62) and Family & lifestyle ($54). Its channels are bigger, though, and at the same size it carries one of the highest indexes (1.88).
• Travel is close to typical for its size. Its $36 median ties Health & fitness, but its index is 1.12 against 1.40: travel deals are mostly on small channels, which cost more per view everywhere.
• Science & education is the reverse. A $25 median looks like a bargain, but these are some of the largest channels in the data, and the index (1.06) says they sold at about the typical price for their size.
• News, commentary, history and gaming sit below 1.00 even after the adjustment. Commentary & pop culture (0.76) and News & politics (0.84) are the cheapest views per size, with Gaming at 0.88 across 2,132 deals on 518 channels, the most of any niche.

Price per view by channel size

Price per view drops as a channel gets bigger. Here we size channels by their projected views at day 30 when the deal was sold, the same number the ThoughtLeaders Chrome extension shows on a channel, rather than by subscribers.

A channel projected under 50,000 views sold at $37 per 1,000, more than twice the $16 of one projected 150,000 to 500,000. The price itself still rises with size, from a median of $800 to $11,160. Only 16 deals were on channels projected above 1.5M views, too few to report.

Niche by size

The same median, split by niche and size band. Each cell shows the median and, in brackets, its deal count. We left a cell blank under 30 deals.

What the grid shows:

• The niche gap is widest on small channels. Under 50,000 projected views, Business & careers ($96) cost more than four times what Commentary & pop culture did ($21), and Health & fitness ($74) more than three times.
• It narrows as channels grow. From 50,000 to 150,000, most niches sat between $18 and $39. Personal finance stayed on top at $48.
• Big channels converge. Only Gaming, News & politics and Commentary & pop culture had enough deals above 500,000 projected views, and all three sold at $11 to $12.

What YouTube’s view count change does to these numbers

On August 24, 2026, YouTube started counting a public view from the first frame of a video, where before a long-form view needed real watching. The old public number lives on in YouTube Studio as “engaged views” (Tubefilter, vidIQ). Coverage since has described the new count as exposure-based (Euronews). Every deal in the tables above was bought before the change, on projections built from the old count. Here is what has happened since, from our data on October 27, 2026.

Prices didn’t move. Deals bought from August 24 to October 26, 2026 had a median of $23.19 per 1,000 projected views (857 deals), against $23.07 in the two months before (683 deals). For the 180 channels that sold in both windows, the typical channel’s price per view changed by a factor of 0.99 and its price by 1.00. The same comparison across the same weeks of 2025 gave 1.07 on 141 channels, so median prices per view look about flat in these windows. That is not proof sellers won’t react later.

Delivered views jumped. For long-form sponsored videos, we compared views at day 30 with the projection the deal was priced on:

• Published June 1 to July 24, 2026: the typical video reached 0.93 times its projection (582 videos).
• Published August 24 to September 26, 2026: 1.52 times (402 videos).
• The same windows of 2025, with no change: 0.94 and 0.91.

So after the change, the typical sponsored long-form video reached about one and a half times the views its price was set on. Measured as a change, and net of the 2025 pattern, the ratio of delivered to projected views rose by about 1.7 times. Before the change, 42% of sponsored videos reached their projection by day 30; after it, 75% did. It isn’t only sponsored videos: across every long-form upload of 34 channels we sampled, day-30 views rose by a factor of 1.47, against 0.89 over the same weeks of 2025.

So the same money now buys more public views. Measured on day-30 public views, the median cost per 1,000 for these videos fell from $29.94 to $17.05. With prices flat and every upload affected, this looks like the counter changing rather than audiences growing, though public counts alone can’t prove it. It lines up with a third-party analysis of 75,000 videos reported by Tubefilter, which found that only about 60% of public views were engaged views.

This also updates the first-week range in what YouTube’s new view count means for your sponsorship math: at day 30, the gap we now see on sponsored long-form is larger than that early read.

What to do as a buyer

• Compare quotes on the same basis. The niche and size medians above are old-basis: price per 1,000 projected views on the old count. A CPM a creator or agency works out on today’s public views will look cheaper for the same spend; in our sponsored videos the median fell from $29.94 to $17.05, though the gap will vary by channel. Don’t count that as a discount, and don’t set an old-basis benchmark against a new-basis CPM.
• Check what a projection is built on. A projection made from videos that reached day 30 before August 24 is old-basis. One built from newer videos is on the new count and will run higher for counting reasons alone. Expect projections to drift up for a while as newer videos age into the 30 to 90 day window they come from.
• Write guarantees in engaged views. A views guarantee set from old-basis history is now much easier to hit on public views: 75% of recent sponsored videos beat their projection by day 30. Ask for engaged views from the creator’s YouTube Studio at a fixed age, such as day 30, or raise a public-view guarantee to match.
• Report delivery CPMs with the date and counter. If you track cost per 1,000 delivered views, a campaign that ran on both sides of August 24 mixes two counting rules. Split it at the change, or use engaged views throughout.

What we don’t know yet, and what we’re checking

• Whether prices follow the projections. Prices per channel have held so far, and projections at purchase are only drifting up (by a factor of 1.02 for the same channels, against 0.93 in 2025, a noisy read). As more post-change videos feed the projections, roughly by late November, we’ll check whether prices rise with them or the price per projected view drops.
• Anything past day 30. Our post-change videos were published by September 26, so we have day-30 readings only. We’ll re-measure longer windows as they age.
• Engaged views on sponsored videos. Engaged views are visible only in the creator’s YouTube Studio. We see public counts, so the jump we measured is public views against an old-basis projection, not a direct engaged-view measurement.
• The effect by niche or channel size. The post-change sample is too small to split. We’ll publish it when it isn’t.
• A broader control. The all-uploads check covers 34 channels that have sold through ThoughtLeaders, not a random sample of YouTube.

What this can and can’t tell you

• A higher price per view isn’t overpriced. Brands paid more per view for beauty, business and finance audiences. Price data can’t tell us why, and it can’t show what those deals returned. Compare on value, not price: check whether brands like yours came back to the channel.
• The niches are our labels, not YouTube’s. We labeled each of 2,239 channels into one niche with an AI classifier that reads the channel’s name, description and summary. In a hand check of 40 random channels, 39 of 40 labels were right. A cooking channel that reviews kitchen gadgets could sit in Food & drink or Consumer tech. Check what a channel actually covers before you pick its row.
• A few rows lean on one seller. In Personal finance & investing and Comedy & entertainment, one channel accounts for about a quarter of the deals. Elsewhere no channel is more than about a fifth of its niche, and in most niches far less.
• Integrations only. Dedicated videos were too few to report, and our data can’t separate Shorts from long-form integrations, so read the tables as pooled benchmarks.

Check any channel against its niche

On YouTube. Open a channel with the ThoughtLeaders Chrome extension. The Pricing & Growth panel shows the channel’s estimated price, and its calculator link shows the projected views at day 30 and the cost per 1,000 views. Find the channel’s niche row and its projected-views column above and compare, keeping the counting rule in mind.

With your AI agent. With the ThoughtLeaders CLI connected, do it for a whole shortlist at once:

For each channel on this list, give me its subscribers, what it mostly covers, the estimated price, long-form projected views at day 30, and the estimated price per 1,000 projected views. Sort by price per view.

Your agent resolves each channel and pulls the same live estimates you see in the extension. Three things to keep in mind when you set the result against these tables. The estimate is a fair-value appraisal, not a quote and not what the channel charges. It doesn’t use niche at all: it starts from projected views and channel size, then adjusts for things like renewals, engagement and US audience share. And today’s projections are moving to the new counting rule as newer videos reach day 30, while every median here is on the old one. So a live estimate per 1,000 projected views can sit below these tables for that reason alone. Treat a gap as a question to ask the creator, not a bargain you can count on, and compare engaged views where you can.

To check one quote quickly, put it into the YouTube sponsorship CPM calculator, or walk through it with your agent: How to check a YouTube sponsorship quote with your AI assistant.

How we measured

The deal set matches our cost-by-size benchmark, which reported 9,002 deals when we pulled it on 2026-10-15. On October 27, 2026 the same filters found 9,098, on 2,064 channels; the difference comes from edits to existing records, such as a status, price or date being corrected. That post sizes channels by subscribers; this one by projected views at the time of sale, so their bands don’t line up. The projection behind each deal is the channel’s day-30 projection when it was sold: the average views of its recent uploads at 30 days old, with outliers capped or dropped. Medians and middle halves throughout, never averages, because a few very expensive deals would skew an average.

Add the Chrome extension to see the estimated price and projected views on the next channel you look at, or install the CLI and ask your agent to benchmark your shortlist.