Who sponsors the biggest YouTube podcasts? A year of sponsors across 145 shows

Podcasts are the part of YouTube where sponsor reads are most visible. A host stops, talks for a minute about a mattress or a meal kit, and the code goes in the description. That also makes them easy to study.

We looked at 145 English-language podcast channels on YouTube with at least 1M subscribers, and at every sponsored video they published in the last 12 months. Below are the brands that sponsor the most of these shows, then the sponsor lists for the shows people search for most.

101 of the 145 had a sponsor we could detect

Seventy percent of the shows published at least one video with a detectable sponsor in the year. The rest either sell their own products, run ads only inside the audio without listing the sponsor in the description, or were not sponsored at all. Some very large shows fall in that group, which is a limit of public data rather than a sign that no one pays them (more on that below).

The brands that sponsor the most big podcasts

The pattern is the classic podcast-ad mix: therapy and health services, meal kits, sleep products, wallets and clothing, privacy tools, and a newer group of prediction-market and fantasy apps (Kalshi, PrizePicks, DraftKings). Many of these are direct-response advertisers that measure every read with a code, which is why they spread across so many shows.

No single brand dominates. The most common sponsor, BetterHelp, appears on 19 of the 145 shows. If you run a podcast channel, there is no "podcast sponsor" to land. There are dozens of brands, each covering a slice.

Sponsor lists for the shows people ask about

These are commercial brands with at least one sponsored video in the last 12 months, as detected from the video description or YouTube's paid-promotion disclosure. We leave out each channel's own products and memberships, and advocacy or political organisations.

The Diary Of A CEO (19.9M): Eight Sleep, Function Health, LinkedIn, Fiverr, Factor, Saily, Vivobarefoot, Ekster, BON CHARGE, Ketone-IQ, Rubrik and Cometeer.

MrBallen (11.1M): AG1, Aura, BetterHelp, Chime, DraftKings, Fabletics, FanDuel, HBO Max, Shopify, Upside and Zocdoc.

Ben Shapiro (7M): Helix Sleep, ExpressVPN, Kalshi, Boll & Branch, Good Ranchers, Legacybox, Lumen, CarShield, Balance of Nature, CookUnity and Ethos, among about 40 detected sponsors.

Tucker Carlson (5.8M): Eight Sleep, SimpliSafe, Cozy Earth, Black Rifle Coffee, Brooklyn Bedding, Good Ranchers, Masa Chips, PureTalk, Hallow, Paleovalley and Dutch.

Chris Williamson (4.3M): Gymshark, LMNT, Momentous, Athletic Brewing, Saily, Shopify and Timeline.

IMPAULSIVE (4.8M): Ridge, SeatGeek, Superpower and Polymarket.

New Heights (3.2M): Nike, Pepsi, Gillette, KFC, Reese's, Apple, Amazon, Adobe, AT&T, Expedia, Liquid I.V., PrizePicks, Planet Fitness, Sleep Number, Spotify and Intuit TurboTax. New Heights is the outlier here: a list of household names rather than direct-response brands.

H3 Podcast (2.5M): Ridge, Incogni, PrizePicks, Cozy Earth, Monarch Money, Omaha Steaks, Policygenius, Stamps.com, Turtle Beach and Whisker.

The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder (2.1M): Ground News, Just Coffee and Trust & Will.

The Bulwark (1.8M): Shopify, Factor, Helix Sleep, BetterHelp, Quince, Ridge, Babbel, DeleteMe, Proton VPN, Function Health, Hims, Mack Weldon and Perplexity.

Brett Cooper (1.7M): Helix Sleep, Cozy Earth, HexClad, Ground News, Honeylove, Good Ranchers, Quo, BON CHARGE and PureTalk.

Pod Save America (1.3M): Incogni, Surfshark, SimpliSafe, ZipRecruiter, Nutrafol, Hungryroot, Tommy John, CookUnity, ShipStation and ZBiotics.

Allie Beth Stuckey (751K): Shopify, Cozy Earth, Good Ranchers, Puori, Range Leather, Patriot Mobile, Seven Weeks Coffee and CrowdHealth.

Several brands appear on shows with very different audiences. Shopify, Helix Sleep, Cozy Earth and Ground News each sponsored hosts who rarely agree with each other. For a direct-response brand, the deciding question is whether the audience buys, not who the host is.

Why some huge shows show almost nothing

Lex Fridman and Call Her Daddy show no detected sponsor in the year, and Theo Von and FLAGRANT show one or two. That does not mean they are unsponsored. Many large podcasts read ads only in the audio, list sponsors on their own website, or sell ads through a podcast network rather than naming the brand in the YouTube description. Our method only sees what is written in the description or flagged as a paid promotion on YouTube, so the lists above are a lower bound for every show.

What this means for a smaller podcast

If you run a podcast channel with 10K to 500K subscribers, the brands in the first table are reachable, but not first. They buy podcasts at scale through networks and agencies. Two practical moves work better:

• Look at the brands that sponsor shows your size in your topic. Every brand page here, for example BetterHelp or Ridge, shows the smallest channel it has sponsored, so you can see who buys below 100K.
• Pitch with the numbers podcast buyers use: average views per episode on YouTube, downloads per episode if you publish audio too, and where your listeners are. Our guide to pitching sponsors and media kit guide cover both.

Method

We took channels in the DiscoverSponsors index with at least 1M subscribers, based in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland or New Zealand, that describe themselves as a podcast in their channel name or description, plus a short list of well-known shows that do not. That gives 145 channels. For each we counted distinct brands with a sponsored video published in the 12 months to October 2026, detected from public video descriptions and YouTube's paid-promotion disclosure through the official YouTube Data API. Each show counts once per brand. Subscriber counts are current. Show lists are not exhaustive: they omit channel self-promotion, advocacy and political organisations, and any ad that is only read aloud. Inclusion is not an endorsement of any brand or show.