What Brands Are Your Competitors Sponsoring on YouTube?

Your competitors are spending money on YouTube creators right now. The question is: do you know which ones? Which creators are they partnering with, how often, and in what niches? Most brands have no idea what their competitors are doing in the influencer marketing space — and that blind spot is costing them.

Competitive intelligence in influencer marketing is one of the most underused tactics available to brand marketers and agency strategists. While companies obsess over competitor ad spend on Google and Meta, they completely ignore the creator partnerships happening in plain sight on YouTube. Every sponsored segment is public. Every brand mention is detectable. The data is there — you just need to know how to use it.

Here’s how to systematically analyze your competitors' YouTube sponsorship strategy, find the gaps they’ve missed, and build a counter-strategy that gives you an edge.

Why Competitor Analysis Matters in Influencer Marketing

If a competitor sponsors a creator, they’ve already validated something important: that creator’s audience converts for your market. They’ve done the research, negotiated the deal, run the campaign, and measured the results. If they come back for a second or third sponsorship with the same creator, that’s even stronger signal — it means the ROI worked.

You don’t need to guess whether a creator’s audience is valuable for your product category. Your competitor already proved it with their own budget. That makes competitor analysis the highest-signal discovery method available to any brand running influencer campaigns.

There’s a second advantage that’s less obvious. Watching your competitors' sponsorship patterns over time reveals their strategy: which niches they prioritize, how much they’re willing to spend, whether they favor one-off tests or long-term partnerships, and where they’re expanding next. That’s the kind of strategic intelligence that usually costs tens of thousands of dollars from a consulting firm — and it’s sitting in publicly available YouTube data.

Step 1: Identify Your Competitors' Sponsorships

The first step is straightforward: find out exactly which creators your competitors are sponsoring. On SponsorRadar, you can search for any brand on the brands page and see their full sponsorship history — every creator they’ve worked with, when the sponsorship happened, and how frequently they’ve partnered.

Let’s say you’re a VPN company entering the YouTube sponsorship space. Your first move is to look up the established players. Search for NordVPN, Surfshark, and ExpressVPN on SponsorRadar. Each brand profile shows their complete creator roster: who they’ve sponsored, how many times, and across which video categories.

NordVPN alone has worked with over 3,000 unique creators. That’s not a number you can research manually. But with structured data, you can pull their entire sponsorship footprint in seconds and start analyzing patterns immediately.

Do this for every direct competitor in your space. If you sell project management software, look up Monday.com, Notion, Asana, and ClickUp. If you sell supplements, look up AG1, Momentous, and Seed. Build a complete picture of who your competitors are working with before you spend a dollar on your own campaigns.

Step 2: Map Their Creator Strategy

Once you have the raw sponsorship data, the real work begins: identifying patterns. Look at each competitor’s creator roster and ask yourself a series of questions.

What creator sizes do they target? Some brands focus almost exclusively on mega-creators with millions of subscribers. Others spread their budget across hundreds of mid-size channels in the 50K–500K range. The distribution tells you about their budget allocation and risk tolerance. A brand sponsoring 200 mid-tier creators is running a very different playbook than one sponsoring 10 mega-creators.

Which niches do they prioritize? Look at the content categories of sponsored creators. Are they concentrated in tech? Spread across lifestyle, gaming, and education? The niche mix reveals which audiences they believe convert best for their product. If a VPN company sponsors mostly gaming creators, they likely see higher conversion rates from that demographic.

How frequently do they sponsor? A brand running 50 sponsorships per month is operating at a completely different scale than one running 5. Frequency also signals budget size and commitment to the channel. Brands that sponsor consistently over multiple quarters have clearly found a formula that works.

Are they doing one-offs or long-term deals? Check whether the same creators appear multiple times in a competitor’s sponsorship history. Repeat partnerships indicate that the brand measured positive ROI and came back for more. One-off sponsorships across many creators suggest a test-and-learn approach where the brand is still searching for what works.

Step 3: Find the Gaps

This is where competitive analysis gets genuinely valuable. You’re not just studying your competitors — you’re looking for what they missed.

Start by identifying creators who operate in the same niches your competitors target but haven’t been sponsored by them yet. These are high-value targets. They have the right audience — same demographics, same interests, same purchasing behavior — but they haven’t been approached by your direct competition. That means no audience fatigue from competing brand messages, no exclusivity clauses blocking you, and likely lower sponsorship rates since they haven’t been bid up by multiple brands.

Also look for creators your competitors used to sponsor but stopped working with. There could be many reasons for the drop — budget reallocation, agency changes, or simply falling through the cracks during a team transition. Whatever the cause, these creators have a proven track record of working with brands in your space and may be open to a new partnership. That’s an opening you can exploit.

Finally, look at adjacent niches. If every VPN brand sponsors tech and gaming creators, who’s reaching the productivity audience? The remote-work audience? The digital nomad and travel audience? These adjacent categories often have equally valuable demographics but far less competition for sponsorship slots.

Step 4: Analyze Sponsorship Overlap

One of the most revealing analyses you can run is a sponsorship overlap comparison. Which creators are sponsored by multiple competitors in your space? And which creators work with only one brand?

Creators sponsored by multiple competitors are proven performers. If NordVPN, Surfshark, and ExpressVPN have all sponsored the same creator, that creator clearly delivers results for VPN products. But these creators are also the most saturated. Their audience has heard multiple VPN pitches, and your message will compete with existing brand associations. You’ll likely pay a premium, and your conversion rates may be lower because the audience is already familiar with the product category.

Creators who work with only one brand in your space are a different story entirely. They might have exclusivity preferences — some creators won’t promote two competing products. Or they might simply not have been approached by other brands yet. Either way, these creators represent a less competitive environment for your message. If you can offer a compelling partnership, you might lock in a creator before your competitors even realize the opportunity exists.

Map out these overlaps visually if it helps. Create a simple spreadsheet with creators on one axis and competitor brands on the other. Mark which brands have sponsored which creators. The patterns will jump out immediately: clusters of shared creators, brands with unique creator relationships, and white-space opportunities where no competitor has ventured.

Step 5: Build Your Counter-Strategy

Based on your competitive analysis, you have three strategic options. Each one is valid depending on your goals, budget, and risk tolerance.

Option A: Match their strategy. Sponsor the same proven creators your competitors use. This is the safest approach because you know these creators convert for your product category. The downside is higher costs (proven creators charge more) and shared audience attention. This works best when you have a clearly differentiated product and a competitive offer that can win even in a crowded space.

Option B: Differentiate. Target the creators your competitors missed. Go after the gaps you identified in Step 3 — same niches but untapped talent, creators who were dropped, channels that are growing fast but haven’t been discovered by competitor brand teams yet. This approach requires more research but often delivers better CPAs because you’re not competing for attention in an already-saturated creator relationship.

Option C: Outflank. Go to entirely different niches that your competitors haven’t explored. If every competitor sponsors tech channels, you sponsor lifestyle and education creators instead. This is the highest-risk, highest-reward option. You’re betting that an untested audience will convert for your product. But if it works, you’ve found a channel your competitors can’t easily replicate because they’re locked into their existing strategy.

The best approach for most brands is a blend: allocate 50% of your budget to proven creators (Option A) for predictable returns, 30% to gap-filling (Option B) for efficiency gains, and 20% to exploration (Option C) for discovering your next big win.

Real-World Example: The VPN Market

Let’s walk through a concrete competitive analysis using the VPN industry as an example. This is one of the most heavily sponsored categories on YouTube, which makes it a perfect case study.

NordVPN sponsors 3,000+ unique creators across virtually every niche. Their strategy is pure volume: test as many creators as possible, measure promo code conversions, and double down on winners. They lean heavily toward tech, gaming, and entertainment commentary channels, but they’ll sponsor almost any category if the audience demographics are right.

Surfshark runs a tighter operation. They focus more heavily on gaming and tech creators, with a particular emphasis on channels in the 100K–500K subscriber range. Their strategy appears to prioritize cost efficiency over reach — mid-tier creators who deliver strong per-dollar conversions rather than expensive mega-influencers.

ExpressVPN leans toward tech reviewers, privacy-focused creators, and channels that cover digital security topics. Their creator roster is smaller but more targeted, suggesting a strategy built around audience relevance over raw volume.

Now imagine you’re launching a new VPN product. Looking at these three competitors, the obvious gap is clear: lifestyle, travel, and productivity creators. None of the big three VPN brands have invested significantly in these categories. A digital nomad who works from coffee shops in Lisbon has exactly the same need for a VPN as a gamer — arguably more, since they’re connecting to public Wi-Fi networks daily. Travel vloggers, remote-work productivity channels, and freelancer-focused content creators represent a massive untapped audience for VPN products that the incumbents have largely ignored.

That’s the power of competitive analysis. Without it, you’d probably default to sponsoring the same tech and gaming creators everyone else targets. With it, you can see exactly where the white space is and move into it before your competitors do.

Turning Intelligence Into Action

Once you have your competitive map, the next step is prioritizing which creators to pursue. Not every gap is worth filling, and not every untapped creator is a good fit for your brand. Evaluate potential partners on three dimensions.

Audience fit. Does this creator’s audience match your target customer profile? Look at demographics, geographic distribution, and purchasing behavior signals. A creator with 200K subscribers in your exact target market is worth more than one with 2 million subscribers in the wrong demographic.

Engagement quality. High subscriber counts mean nothing if the audience doesn’t engage. Look at comment sections, like-to-view ratios, and whether the creator’s calls-to-action actually drive behavior. A creator whose audience trusts their recommendations will convert far better than one with passive viewers who watch and scroll past.

Competitive gap. How saturated is this creator with competitor sponsorships? A creator who has never worked with a brand in your category is a clean slate — their audience hasn’t developed ad blindness for your product type. A creator who runs a different VPN ad every month is probably not your best investment no matter how good their metrics look.

For a deeper framework on evaluating individual creators once you’ve identified them, see our guide on how to evaluate YouTube creators before sponsoring them.

Your Next Steps

Competitive sponsorship analysis doesn’t have to be complicated. Start with these three actions and you’ll have more intelligence than 90% of brand marketers in your space.

First, search your top 3 competitors on SponsorRadar. Pull up their brand profiles and review their creator rosters. Note how many creators they sponsor, which niches they target, and how frequently they run campaigns.

Second, map their creator rosters side by side. Identify which creators are shared across competitors (saturated) and which are unique to one brand (potential exclusives). Look for the niches and creator tiers where no competitor has a presence.

Third, build your shortlist. Based on the gaps you’ve identified, create a prioritized list of 20–30 creators to evaluate for your next campaign. Focus on creators with the right audience, strong engagement, and minimal overlap with your competitors' existing partnerships.

The brands that win in influencer marketing aren’t the ones that spend the most. They’re the ones that spend the smartest. And smart spending starts with knowing exactly what your competitors are doing — and where they’re leaving opportunities on the table.