Who sponsors the 100 biggest YouTube channels? Not the brands you’d expect

Ask a creator which brands sponsor YouTube and you get the same names: VPNs, meal kits, therapy apps, clothing. Those are the brands that sponsor the most channels. We wanted to know whether they are also the brands behind the very biggest channels, so we took the 100 most-subscribed creator channels in our index and looked at every sponsored video they published in the last 12 months.

The short version: the top of YouTube is a different market. No single brand sponsored more than 5 of the 100. The brands that sponsor the most channels overall sponsored almost none of them. And 27 of the 100 had no detectable sponsor at all.

No brand sponsored more than 5 of the top 100

Across the 100 channels we found 391 distinct brands and 490 brand-to-channel pairs. The spread is wide and flat. The two brands at the top, RedMagic and Samsung, each sponsored 5 of the 100. Six brands sponsored 4. Eleven sponsored 3. Everything else appears on one or two channels.

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The pattern by category: phone and electronics makers (RedMagic, Samsung, LG), game publishers (Epic Games, EA, Ubisoft, Genshin Impact, War Thunder, Neverness to Everness), toys (LEGO), and a few platforms (Google Gemini, Whatnot, Shopify). These are brands that buy one big placement at a time, usually a launch or a campaign, rather than a standing slot on hundreds of channels.

The brands that sponsor the rest of YouTube skipped the top 100

Here is the same 12 months from the other side. We took the 12 brands that sponsored the most channels in the whole index and counted how many of the 100 biggest channels each one touched.

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Six of the twelve biggest sponsors on YouTube did not sponsor a single one of the 100 biggest channels. The only ones that did are the privacy and connectivity brands: NordVPN, Saily, Incogni, Surfshark and Hostinger, which between them reached 13 placements among the top 100.

This is the clearest evidence we have seen that there are two sponsorship markets on YouTube. Performance brands like BetterHelp, Temu, Quince and Factor buy reach in volume, one mid-sized channel at a time, and measure it with codes and links. A 50M-subscriber channel is priced like a TV campaign, and the buyers at that level are consumer electronics, games, toys and platform launches with a different budget and a different goal.

27 of the 100 had no sponsor we could find

Twenty-seven of the 100 channels published no video with a detectable sponsor in 12 months. Most of them are not creator channels in the usual sense: music labels (HYBE LABELS, Saregama, 7clouds), television networks (ABS-CBN, Republic Bharat, TV9, SOMOY TV), Netflix India, TED and TEDx Talks, and game publishers’ own channels such as Brawl Stars.

But some are creators you would expect to see sponsored: SSSniperWolf, Nick DiGiovanni, Chloe Ting, SSundee, CarryMinati, AuronPlay and elrubiusOMG. Two readings are possible. Some channels at this size make more from their own products, licensing and platform revenue than a sponsor would pay. And some deals at this level are negotiated with no description text and no paid-promotion flag, which means our method does not see them. We count what the public record shows, not what was signed.

Among the 73 channels that did have a sponsor, the typical channel had 3 brands in the year. Forty-seven channels had between 1 and 4 brands, 12 had between 5 and 9, and 14 had 10 or more.

The channels with the most brands

The outlier is Unbox Therapy with 78 distinct brands, which says more about the format than the market: a review channel features a product in most videos, and many of those placements are paid. After it, the list is gaming and education.

MrBeast is the interesting case. Twenty-six brands in a year on the largest channel on YouTube is not a sign of a standing sponsor. It is a sign that every video is sold separately, often to a different buyer, and that the brands lining up for the biggest audiences are not the ones running a thousand mid-sized integrations.

Examples you can inspect

Every pair below comes from a public video description or YouTube’s paid-promotion disclosure. Open the video and read the description yourself.

• Whatnot on MrBeast: Ages 1 to 100 Race, published February 2026.
• NordVPN on Kurzgesagt: This Woman Cured Her Cancer with an Insane Method, September 2026.
• Samsung on Mark Rober: How Do Hot Air Balloons Actually Steer?, November 2025.
• LEGO on LazarBeam: Building LEGO Blind Challenge, December 2025, with YouTube’s paid-promotion flag set.
• Holafly on Luisito Comunica: No sabía que esto pasa en España, October 2026, with the paid-promotion flag set.

What this means if your channel has 10K to 1M subscribers

The brands at the top of this list are not where a mid-sized channel should start. Google Gemini sponsored 61 channels in the year and exactly one of them was under 100K subscribers. FIFA sponsored 13 channels and the smallest had 800K. Genshin Impact reached 2 channels under 100K out of 61.

But a few brands sit in both markets, and those are worth your attention, because a brand that sponsors PewDiePie and a 30K channel in the same quarter has a process for both.

• Saily: 3 of the top 100, and 246 channels under 100K subscribers.
• NordVPN: 4 of the top 100, and 164 channels under 100K.
• Holafly: 3 of the top 100, and 161 channels under 100K.
• Incogni: 3 of the top 100, and 118 channels under 100K.
• Samsung: 5 of the top 100, and 38 channels under 100K.
• Shopify: 3 of the top 100, and 36 channels under 100K.
• Ubisoft: 3 of the top 100, and 34 channels under 100K.
• Whatnot: 4 of the top 100, and 31 channels under 100K.

For everyone else, the practical lesson is the one the second chart makes: the brands that will actually reply to a 20K or 200K channel are the volume buyers, and they are almost absent from the top 100. Looking at who sponsors MrBeast tells you what a launch budget looks like. Looking at who sponsors channels your size tells you who to email. Our guide to finding sponsors for your channel starts from the second list, and every brand page on this site shows the smallest channel a brand has sponsored, so you can check before you write.

Method

We ranked the channels in the DiscoverSponsors index by subscriber count and kept the 100 largest channels that we classify as creator channels by their content. The smallest channel in the set has 22.7M subscribers. Channels we have not classified, mostly corporate and label accounts, were excluded before the cut, which is why some well-known accounts do not appear.

For each of the 100 channels we counted the distinct brands with a sponsored video published in the 12 months to October 2026, detected from public video descriptions and YouTube’s paid-promotion disclosures through the official YouTube Data API. Each channel counts once per brand, no matter how many videos carried the brand. “Channels sponsored overall” uses the same rule across the whole index.

Detection has limits. Deals mentioned only in the video, with no description text and no paid-promotion flag, are not counted. Affiliate promotions can be included where a description does not distinguish them from paid placements; where our classifier could not tell, the pair is marked unclear and we did not use it as an example above. None of this is an endorsement of any brand, and a brand’s presence on the top 100 says nothing about whether it will reply to you.