Every number on SponsorRadar comes from watching what YouTube channels actually publish. This page says what each number means, how it is produced, how often it updates, and where it falls short. If you cite our data, cite this page with it.
A deal is a single sponsorship placement we detected in a single published video: a sponsor read, a description disclosure, a promo code or an affiliate link that resolves to a brand. A brand that sponsors ten episodes of one channel counts as ten deals and one sponsor relationship.
We fetch each new video's metadata and, where available, its transcript, and run a detector that looks for sponsorship language and links. Every detection carries a confidence score. Public pages only count high-confidence detections; low-confidence candidates stay out of every total and ranking.
Organic product mentions with no sponsorship signal. YouTube's own ads. Merchandise a creator sells. Sponsorships that are never disclosed in the video or its description. Audio-only podcasts that do not publish to YouTube.
We index channels from creator sign-ups, from sponsor pages we crawl, and from discovery runs that follow brands to the channels they sponsor. Coverage is strongest above 50,000 subscribers and thinner below it, so any statistic about small channels is an undercount of the market, not a measurement of it.
Channel statistics such as subscriber counts and views refresh nightly from YouTube. New videos are checked for sponsors within days of publication, and rankings, hub pages and list pages are recomputed every night. Detection lags publication, so the most recent weeks on any chart are incomplete and fill in over time.
Deals are dated by the video's publish date where we have it, otherwise by when we detected them. Monthly charts use the publish date.
A channel page lists every high-confidence sponsor we detected on that channel, the videos they appeared in, and the channel's public statistics. Channels with fewer than two detected sponsors are still published but are not submitted to search engines.
A brand page lists the channels a brand sponsored, with the most recent deals first. Brands are matched from names, domains and promo links; when two spellings clearly refer to one company we merge them.
Rankings order channels by current subscriber count. Niche lists use the category we assign each channel from its recent video titles and description. Country lists use the country the channel set on YouTube; channels with no country set are not ranked by country. The podcast list covers channels that call themselves a podcast in their title, or in their description when at least half of their recent uploads run 25 minutes or more. A missing channel means we have not indexed it, not that it is smaller.
Top sponsor lists count high-confidence deals in a window, usually the last 12 months, across the channels in scope. The same brand can rank differently on a niche page and on the overall page because the scopes differ.
Where we show estimated earnings, the number is a model, not a report. Ad revenue is estimated from views and a niche RPM range; sponsorship income is estimated from detected deals and a niche CPM range applied to average views. Ranges are shown as ranges. We do not estimate net worth, because assets and liabilities are not observable from public videos.
Sponsorship rate benchmarks combine detected deal frequency with published industry CPM ranges. They describe what channels of a size and niche typically command, not what any specific creator charged.
Because we index more channels every month, deal counts rise partly from coverage and partly from market activity. Charts that compare months carry this bias; we say so on the chart.
Some sponsorships are phrased in ways the detector misses, and occasionally a brand is matched wrongly. We log every reported error and fix the class of mistake, not just the instance. If you see one, tell us.
Creators can claim their channel and correct their category. Brands can ask for merges or removals. Write to david@sponsorradar.com.
You are welcome to cite any public number with a link to the page it came from and the date shown on that page. For research or reporting that needs a custom cut of the data, write to us; we share aggregates with journalists and researchers at no cost.
Connect your channel to see every sponsor we detected on it and correct anything we got wrong.
