Coverage and method

We drew a sample of 23,142 YouTube channels, read one transcript from each, and recorded the sponsorships we could name. This page publishes the denominators behind the index: how many channels we looked at, how many we managed to read, and how many turned out to carry a sponsor. We did not look at every channel on YouTube, so treat the figures below as a sample of it.

Sponsor rate by channel size

Channels are grouped by their current subscriber count, using the same bands the sample was drawn on.

How the detection compares to YouTube’s own flag

YouTube asks creators to flag a video that contains a paid promotion. Across the 916 videos we read where the flag was set, we named a brand in 63.2% of them.

We also named a brand on 742 channels whose creator left the flag off. That is not a count of our mistakes — the flag is optional and often skipped, so its absence is not evidence that nothing was sponsored, and we cannot tell an unflagged sponsorship from a wrong read from here.

What is in the index

1,680 sponsorships, 1,429 brands and 1,321 creators. Last rebuilt 2026-08-31. It rebuilds nightly, so these figures move.

Category mix

• Other — 392 brands, 426 mentions
• Software & SaaS — 113 brands, 132 mentions
• Consumer Electronics — 110 brands, 127 mentions
• Finance & Investing — 90 brands, 114 mentions
• E-commerce & Marketplaces — 93 brands, 112 mentions
• Automotive — 91 brands, 100 mentions
• Home Goods — 75 brands, 87 mentions
• Beauty & Grooming — 68 brands, 73 mentions
• Fashion & Apparel — 59 brands, 72 mentions
• Health & Supplements — 60 brands, 67 mentions
• Travel — 42 brands, 49 mentions
• Education & Courses — 38 brands, 47 mentions
• Media & Entertainment — 41 brands, 45 mentions
• Insurance — 31 brands, 35 mentions
• Telecom — 27 brands, 35 mentions
• Meal Kits & Food — 21 brands, 33 mentions
• Creator Tools — 26 brands, 31 mentions
• Video Games — 23 brands, 28 mentions
• Mobile Games — 22 brands, 26 mentions
• VPN & Privacy — 13 brands, 26 mentions
• Fitness — 14 brands, 15 mentions

Top brands by creator count

• Temu — 11 creators
• HelloFresh — 10 creators
• Quint — 9 creators
• FlexiSpot — 8 creators
• Holafly — 8 creators
• Squarespace — 8 creators
• Zocdoc — 8 creators
• PCBWay — 7 creators
• BetterHelp — 6 creators
• Free Cash — 6 creators
• NordVPN — 6 creators
• XTB — 6 creators
• Bluetti — 5 creators
• Quince — 5 creators
• Revolut — 5 creators
• Shein — 5 creators
• Skillshare — 5 creators
• War Thunder — 5 creators
• Autodoc — 4 creators
• Car Vertical — 4 creators

How this was measured

We read one transcript per channel, from its latest upload. We do not go through a channel’s back catalogue, so a creator who ran a sponsorship last month and not this one counts as un-sponsored here.

• The rate divides by the transcripts we successfully read, not by every channel we sampled. A channel with captions turned off tells us nothing either way.
• Only high- and medium-confidence mentions of a named brand enter the index. An uncertain read, or one where the model could not name the brand, is left out.

The published rate is a floor

Everything below pushes the number down. Nothing we do pushes it up.

• A sponsorship the model read with low confidence is dropped.
• A brand name we cannot turn into a page address is dropped, because it has nowhere to link to.
• A channel whose handle is not ASCII is dropped for that same reason, and that removes non-English channels more often than English ones.

The raw counts sit next to the rate above and in the public export, so anyone can recompute.

Licence

These counts and the index itself are published under CC BY 4.0. The transcripts underneath are not published and are not covered by it.

Index by MerchSage — sampled from public YouTube videos.