YouTube Sponsorship Rates by Subscriber Count (2026 Guide)

Two channels, both sitting at 100,000 subscribers. One gets a $2,000 offer for an integration and takes it. The other quotes $9,000 and the brand pays without much of a fight. Neither creator is being unreasonable. They just have completely different businesses behind the same number.

That's the problem with every "YouTube sponsorship rates by subscriber count" page you'll find, including, in a sense, this one. A rate table sorted by subscriber count is sorted by the least informative metric YouTube produces. It's still where every negotiation starts, because it's the first number a brand can see without asking you for anything, so you need to know the table. You also need to know exactly how far off it can be, and in which direction.

So here's the table, plus the arithmetic that produced it, plus an argument for the number you should actually be quoting from.

Where these numbers come from, and where they don't

Let's get the honest part out of the way first, because most pages on this topic skip it entirely.

YouTube does not publish sponsorship rates. There is no official rate card, no platform guidance, no policy document that says a 100K channel is worth $2,000 a video. Sponsorship pricing is a private negotiation between a creator and a brand, and nobody involved has an incentive to publish what was paid. Every rate table on the internet, ours included, is an estimate. Ours is assembled from published agency rate cards and from rates creators have shared publicly, which is exactly what our methodology page says, in those words.

That distinction matters, and the pages competing for this search term mostly bury it. Go looking and you'll find tidy tables of dollar figures presented as flat fact. Some name no source at all. Others gesture at aggregated deal data without saying whose deals, how many, or when they were collected. A table you have no way to check is not data. It's decoration.

What we can do instead is show our work. Every figure in this post comes out of one formula, the same one behind our YouTube Sponsorship Rate Calculator:

(Subscribers / 1,000) x Base Rate x Engagement Multiplier x Niche Multiplier x Content Type Multiplier

The YouTube base rate is $20 to $50 per 1,000 subscribers for a standard integration. Every other number below is that base rate pushed around by multipliers you can check yourself. If you disagree with one of the multipliers, you can swap it and recompute. That's the whole point.

YouTube sponsorship rates by subscriber count

Here's the main table. Read the assumptions underneath it before you quote anything from it, because they do a lot of work.

Baseline: $20–$50 per 1,000 subscribers, an engagement multiplier of 1.0 (from 1% up to but not including 3%), a niche multiplier of 1.0 (a neutral niche such as food or fashion), and a single-deliverable deal. Every cell is (subscribers / 1,000) x base rate x the content-type multiplier for that column. Nothing else is applied.

Notice the table scales perfectly linearly. A million subscribers prices at exactly 200 times what 5,000 subscribers prices at. That is not how the real market behaves, and it's worth understanding why we left it that way: linearity is what falls out of a per-1,000 base rate, and pretending otherwise would mean inventing a curve we have no data to justify. The honest move is to keep the arithmetic transparent and tell you where it bends in practice.

Where does it bend? Two places. At the very bottom, under about 5,000 subscribers, the math produces numbers so small that they stop being worth the production time, and most deals at that size are gifted product or flat minimums rather than a per-subscriber calculation. At the very top, above roughly a million, deals stop being priced off a formula at all and start being priced off what the brand's quarterly budget can absorb, what the creator's agent is willing to accept, and how badly the brand wants that specific name attached to the campaign.

Between those two edges, from about 5,000 subscribers up to about a million, the formula holds up reasonably well as a starting anchor. It is steadiest through the middle of that span, roughly 10,000 to 500,000, which is where most sponsorship deals actually get done.

The four formats, and why they're 5x apart

Same channel, same audience, same week. The format alone moves the price by a factor of five between a Short and a dedicated video.

Integration (1.0x)

A sponsored segment inside a video that would have existed anyway. Usually 60 to 90 seconds, dropped somewhere in the first third, with a link in the description. This is the default, the format the base rate is calibrated to, and the one brands ask for most because it rides along on content your audience already showed up for.

Dedicated video (2.0x)

The entire video is the sponsorship. A full review, a build, a challenge structured around the product. Twice the rate, and it earns it: you're handing over the full runtime, the title, the thumbnail and the algorithmic slot that video occupies. You're also taking on real risk, because a dedicated sponsor video that underperforms costs you more than lost revenue. It costs you a week of channel momentum.

Price dedicated videos as if the slot has an opportunity cost, because it does.

Pre-roll (0.6x)

A sponsor read at the very top, before the content starts, usually 30 to 60 seconds. Cheaper than an integration for an obvious reason: it sits in the exact position viewers have been trained to skip. It's quick to produce and easy to stack, which is why it works well as an add-on rather than a headline deliverable.

Short (0.4x)

A sponsored Short prices at 40% of an integration on the same channel, and creators find this one genuinely annoying because a Short can pull more raw views than a long-form video. The gap is not about views. It's about what the brand gets per view. A Short is a fast scroll, the description sits collapsed behind a tap, and there is no room to build a case for a product. Our reading is that most of the views arrive from the Shorts feed rather than from your subscribers, which is another reason brands pay less for one. YouTube publishes no split between the two, so take that last part as an argument rather than a measurement.

If your channel is Shorts-first, pricing off your subscriber count will underprice you badly. The next section is about fixing exactly that.

Subscriber count is the worst predictor on YouTube

This is the part that actually matters, and it's why a YouTube rate table needs a warning label that an Instagram or TikTok one doesn't.

On most platforms, follower count and reach at least loosely track each other. On YouTube they routinely come apart, and not by 20%. A 50,000-subscriber channel that hit a search-driven vein can average 200,000 views a video. Another 50,000-subscriber channel, built during one viral spike three years ago, averages 10,000. Same tier on every rate card ever published. Twenty times the audience delivered.

Watch what happens when you translate the table into the language brands actually budget in. Both channels quote the 50,000-subscriber integration rate, which is $1,000 to $2,500:

Implied CPM = (rate / average views) x 1,000. Both rows quote the same subscriber-based integration rate, 50,000 / 1,000 x $20 to $50. The main table above has no 50,000 row, so this one is computed exactly the way every cell in it is.

Channel A is selling reach at $5 per thousand views and leaving a fortune on the table. Channel B is asking $250 per thousand and will get laughed out of the thread. Neither creator did anything wrong. The metric did.

Price off views per video instead

The fix is a one-line substitution. Run the same formula, but put your average views per video over the last 10 uploads where the subscriber count goes.

For Channel A: 200,000 / 1,000 x $20 to $50 = $4,000 to $10,000 for an integration. Four times the subscriber-based number, and defensible in a single sentence, because the brand can verify the view counts themselves in about thirty seconds.

For Channel B: 10,000 / 1,000 x $20 to $50 = $200 to $500. Lower, yes. Also the number that actually closes, and closing at $350 beats not closing at $2,000.

Use the last 10 uploads, not your best video and not your lifetime average. Ten recent uploads captures your current distribution without letting one outlier carry the whole quote. If a brand asks for proof, a screen recording of your Studio content tab does it. Volunteer it before they ask; leading with a number a brand can independently confirm is worth more than any amount of adjective.

One timing note, because it lands right in the middle of a 10-upload window. From August 24, 2026, YouTube counts a public view the moment a video starts to play, across Shorts, long-form and live. That is a looser definition than the one before it, so if your last 10 uploads straddle that date, the newer ones can read higher for reasons that have nothing to do with your channel. Say which number you are quoting. And be aware there are two: YouTube Partner Program earnings still run on engaged views, so the count in your public stats and the count your ad revenue is paid on are not the same figure.

Engagement: why two identical channels charge differently

Views tell a brand how many people saw the video. Engagement tells them whether anyone cared. Our model treats it as a straight multiplier on the base rate:

Applied to the 100,000-subscriber integration rate at the low end of the base range ($2,000). Engagement here means likes plus comments as a share of views.

Four times the rate across the range, at an identical subscriber count. This is the single biggest reason two channels of the same size quote wildly different numbers, and it's also the lever most creators can genuinely move inside a quarter.

Worth saying out loud, because the main table at the top of this post does not: the 1.0x row is not the typical YouTube channel. The platform-wide median is 3.06% of views, which sits in the 1.5x band. So a channel with genuinely average engagement already prices above that baseline table, and the 1.0x row describes a channel doing a bit worse than most.

One nuance worth knowing if you're comparing your number against a friend's: the calculator's band lookup is strictly less-than at every boundary. A channel sitting at exactly 3.0% lands in the 1.5x band rather than the 1.0x one, and a channel at exactly 5.0% lands in the 2.0x band rather than the 1.5x one. Small thing, but at 3.0% it's the difference between quoting $2,000 and quoting $3,000, and you should know which side of a boundary you're on before you send the email.

If your engagement is genuinely above 5%, say so in your first message and put the number in your media kit. It's the fastest way to justify pricing at the top of a published range instead of the middle.

Niche multipliers: some audiences are worth double

Not all thousand-subscriber blocks are worth the same to an advertiser. A finance audience contains people about to open a brokerage account. An entertainment audience contains people who are, mostly, being entertained. Brands price that difference, and so do we:

Applied to the 100,000-subscriber integration rate at the low end of the base range ($2,000). The calculator's niche menu carries four more options that are not in this table: animals and pets, arts and culture, design and architecture, and general. None of the four has a multiplier of its own, so all four price at 1.0x.

Finance to entertainment is a 2.5x spread at identical size. Stack that on the engagement multiplier and two 100,000-subscriber channels can legitimately be 10 times apart on price, a wider gap than either creator in the opening example would have guessed.

These are sponsorship multipliers, and they are not the same thing as ad CPM by niche. Related, driven by similar advertiser demand, but measuring different transactions. If you want the ad-revenue side of the picture, our breakdown of what counts as a good CPM on YouTube covers niche rates for AdSense, and the YouTube Money Calculator estimates what your views earn without a sponsor involved.

One caution about niche shopping: pick the niche your content actually is, not the one with the best multiplier. A brand's first move after reading your rate is to open your channel.

The add-ons brands hope you forget to charge for

Everything so far prices one piece of content, posted on your channel, doing its normal thing. The moment a brand wants anything beyond that, it's a separate line item. These sit on top of the base rate as percentages, not as a replacement for it:

• Usage rights: +75%. The brand can repost your content on their own organic channels, screenshot it, put it in a newsletter. Broader than most creators assume when they skim a contract. Our usage rights glossary entry has the scope questions to ask before you agree.
• Whitelisting or paid amplification: +150%. The brand runs paid ads through your handle, so the ad appears to come from you. This is the big one.
• Exclusivity: +20% for 30 days, +40% for 60 days, +60% for 90 days. You agree not to promote a competitor for that window. You are selling future revenue, so price it as such.

Whitelisting is the single most commonly given-away-free item in creator contracts, and it deserves its own paragraph. When a brand whitelists your content, they take a piece of media you produced, attach their ad budget to it, and push it to an audience that has nothing to do with your channel. The video you were paid $2,000 for might get put in front of two million people. Your organic reach becomes the smallest part of the campaign, and the part you were compensated for is the only part you priced.

It shows up in briefs as innocuous phrasing: "we may boost this," "standard paid support," "amplification across our channels." None of that reads like a licensing request, which is exactly why it gets waved through. Ask directly, every time: are you running paid media through my handle, for how long, and in which markets? If the answer is yes, our model prices it at +150%. No platform publishes a whitelisting rate and no survey we would stand behind measures one, so treat 150% as an opening position, not a market average.

The mechanics are on your side here, at least if you are in the Partner Program. YouTube's brand partner access works by you generating a unique code in Studio and sending it to the brand, and when they click it your video connects to their Google Ads account. Generating a code is a YPP-only feature, and the brand can also request access from their end, so it is not always you who moves first. When it is, there is a moment where the ask has to be made out loud and you can price it before you share anything. On the advertiser side Google Ads sells the matching product as Creator partnerships boost, so a brief using that phrase is talking about running paid media against your video.

Add-ons stack additively against your base rate rather than compounding on each other, which keeps the math checkable. Whitelisting plus 30-day exclusivity is +150% plus +20%, so 170% on top of base, meaning 2.7 times your quote.

A worked example, end to end

A tech channel with 80,000 subscribers and a 4.2% engagement rate. The brand wants an integration, plus whitelisting, plus 30 days of exclusivity against competing products.

1. Base: 80,000 / 1,000 x $35 (the midpoint of the $20 to $50 range) = $2,800
2. Engagement multiplier, 4.2% falls in the 3% to under 5% band: $2,800 x 1.5 = $4,200
3. Niche multiplier, tech at 1.5x: $4,200 x 1.5 = $6,300
4. Content type, integration at 1.0x: unchanged at $6,300

So the content fee is $6,300. Across the full base range rather than the midpoint, that's roughly $3,600 to $9,000, which is the honest way to quote it.

Now the add-ons, applied to the $6,300 content fee:

• Whitelisting: +150%, so +$9,450
• Exclusivity, 30 days: +20%, so +$1,260

All-in: $17,010.

The content fee is 37% of the deal. The other 63% is the two things the brand described in half a sentence of the brief. If you had quoted "my rate is $6,300" and agreed to everything else as part of the package, you would have delivered $17,010 of value for $6,300, and set an anchor you'd be fighting for the next two years.

The evergreen tail nobody prices in

Here's the structural advantage YouTube creators have and almost never charge for.

An Instagram Story is gone in 24 hours. A TikTok mostly does its work in its first few days, though TikTok publishes no decay curve and plenty of videos get a second life weeks later. A YouTube integration is still surfacing in search results, in suggested videos, and in the sidebar of somebody's third video of the evening, two years after upload. The brand's 60 seconds keeps playing, for free, indefinitely.

Almost every rate conversation prices the launch window and stops. The brand budgets against the views they expect in the first 28 days, because 28 days is the window a lot of campaign reporting runs on. That is what we keep seeing in briefs rather than something anyone publishes, and creators accept the framing because it's the framing they were handed.

Three ways to actually charge for the tail:

Quote off a 90-day view projection, not 28 days. If your videos typically pick up another 40% of their views between day 28 and day 90, then a quote built on the 28-day number is priced against roughly 70% of the audience the brand actually gets. Pull the real numbers from your Studio analytics on your last several uploads, put the curve in front of the brand, and quote against the larger figure. The evidence is right there in your own channel.

Price permanence separately. A description link that stays live forever is worth more than one that comes down after a quarter. An on-video integration that can never be edited out is worth more than a pinned comment. If a brand wants a permanent placement, that is a longer license than a 30-day campaign, and it should not cost the same.

Never edit or remove an integration for free. Sponsors sometimes come back months later asking you to pull or change a segment. That is a new request against a video that is still earning them impressions. Treat it as a new line item.

None of this is exotic. It's the same argument agencies make when they price a billboard for twelve months instead of one, and it works because it's true.

Comparing YouTube against your other platforms

If you're posting to more than one platform, the per-follower gap is stark. At the midpoint of each range, YouTube runs about twice Instagram's rate for the same audience size and about three and a half times TikTok's. The ranges do overlap at the edges, so a weak YouTube channel and a strong Instagram account can land in the same place, but the typical case is not close. Production effort, content lifespan, and how much of a purchase decision a viewer will sit through are why we set the base rates the way we did.

For the other two legs, see our breakdowns of Instagram sponsorship rates by follower count and TikTok sponsorship rates by follower count. If you want to price a package across several platforms at once, the multi-platform sponsorship calculator puts them side by side.

Two more things worth reading if this is your first deal. The general pricing frameworks, cost per follower and cost per engagement and how to cross-check one against the other, live in how to calculate your sponsorship rate. And if the problem isn't pricing but the fact that nobody is emailing you yet, how to get brand deals as a small creator covers the outreach side. YouTube has its own inbound pipeline too. Creator Partnerships replaced BrandConnect in March 2026 and sits in the Earn tab. BrandConnect's 25,000-subscriber bar is gone, but the door is not open to everyone: you still need to be in the YouTube Partner Program, 18 or over, in a supported country, and clear of Community Guidelines strikes. The YPP entry bar for new creators rises on February 1, 2027, so that gate is getting higher, not lower.

Tick the paid promotion box

One setting, and it is not optional. Uploading in YouTube Studio, click Show more, and under "Paid Promotion" select "Yes, my video includes branded content." On a video you have already published, the same control sits under Details. YouTube's own wording is that selecting it "adds a disclosure label that appears at the beginning of your video".

That setting is YouTube's requirement. Your legal obligation is separate, and it does not transfer to the brand. The FTC puts responsibility on you and the brand together, not on the platform, so a brand agreeing to handle disclosure does not get you off the hook. The FTC's own guidance for influencers says a disclosure has to be hard to miss: in the video itself, spoken or on screen, close to the endorsement rather than parked at the end. A line in the description on its own does not get you there.

Some brands will ask you to skip it, usually phrased as wanting the content to "feel organic" or read as a genuine recommendation. Say no, in writing, before you shoot. The brand carries almost none of the risk if it goes wrong. You carry the strike, and a channel with a reputation for undisclosed ads is worth less to the next sponsor anyway.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much should a YouTuber with 100K subscribers charge for a sponsorship?

At a neutral engagement rate and a neutral niche, the baseline is $2,000 to $5,000 for an integration and $4,000 to $10,000 for a dedicated video. Those numbers move fast, though. A 100K tech channel with 4% engagement prices at roughly 2.25 times the baseline once the niche and engagement multipliers are applied. Check your average views per video too: if you're averaging well above 100,000 views, the subscriber-based number is understating you.

What is the average sponsorship rate per 1,000 YouTube subscribers?

$20 to $50 per 1,000 subscribers for a standard integration. Multiply by 2.0 for a dedicated video, 0.6 for a pre-roll, or 0.4 for a Short. That range is our own estimate, built from published agency rate cards and rates creators have shared publicly rather than from anything YouTube publishes, and it assumes neutral engagement and a neutral niche before any multiplier is applied.

Should I price a YouTube sponsorship on subscribers or views?

Views, in almost every case. Subscriber count is a lifetime total that says nothing about your current distribution, and on YouTube the two diverge more than on any other platform. Use your average views per video across your last 10 uploads in place of the subscriber count in the same formula. It's more accurate, and a brand can verify it in seconds, which makes the quote much easier to defend.

Why do two channels with the same subscriber count get such different offers?

Three variables do most of the work: average views per video, engagement rate, and niche. Engagement alone spans 0.5x to 2.0x in our model, and niche spans 0.8x to 2.0x. Stack those and two 100,000-subscriber channels can be a full 10 times apart on a defensible rate, before you account for the fact that one of them might be getting 20 times the views per upload.