Two channels, both sitting at 100,000 subscribers. One averages 8,000 views a video and the other 60,000. At our general-niche rate the first prices an integration at $96 to $200 and the second at $720 to $1,500. 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 what a 100K channel is worth. 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. For YouTube, we checked every rate in this post against published per-view rate bands, and the main ones are linked under Sources on the YouTube Sponsorship Rate Calculator. One of them, built from an agency's own deal records, puts its typical finance deal near $100 per 1,000 views, above our whole finance range, so read our finance numbers as the cautious end. Most of our rows sit inside the published bands; travel runs a little above the one travel-specific band we found, and a few of our low ends sit below theirs.
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:
(Average views per video / 1,000) x Niche rate per 1,000 views x Format
Our rates run $8 to $70 per 1,000 average views for a standard 60 to 90 second integration, from entertainment and gaming at the bottom to finance at the top. Subscriber count is not in the formula. Every other number below is that rate applied to a view count and a format. If you disagree with a rate, you can swap it and recompute. That's the whole point.
Info
Rates in this guide are our own estimates, built from published agency rate cards and rates creators have shared publicly. They are not YouTube policy. Treat them as a defensible starting position for a negotiation, not as a price YouTube will back you up on.
YouTube sponsorship rates by subscriber count
Subscriber count does not set the price, but it is how people search, so here is the table by subscribers, priced three ways. Read the notes underneath it before you quote anything from it, because they do a lot of work.
| Subscribers | Videos average 5% of subs | Videos average 15% of subs | Videos average 30% of subs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | $3–$6 † | $9–$19 † | $18–$38 † |
| 25,000 | $15–$31 † | $45–$94 † | $90–$188 † |
| 100,000 | $60–$125 † | $180–$375 | $360–$750 |
| 500,000 | $300–$625 | $900–$1,875 | $1,800–$3,750 |
| 1,000,000 | $600–$1,250 | $1,800–$3,750 | $3,600–$7,500 † |
These are scenarios, not measured averages. We could not find a published, sourced figure for how many views a YouTube video gets as a share of subscribers, so the columns show three plainly labelled cases. Every cell is an integration priced at views / 1,000 x our general-niche rate of $12 to $25 per 1,000 views.
† Outside the 15,000 to 250,000 average views a video our rates are built from. Smaller channels are often paid product plus a fee or a flat minimum, and bigger ones negotiate deal by deal.
The price scales in a straight line with views. Real deals bend at both ends: under a few thousand views, a deal may be product plus a fee or a flat minimum instead of a per-view formula, and at the top, budgets rather than formulas decide.
Tip
The calculator opens on 25,000 subscribers and 8,000 average views, which prices an integration at $96 to $200 in a general niche. Enter your own average views; that is the input that moves the price.
The four formats
Same channel, same week. The format moves the price, and one of the four is priced on different views entirely.
| Format | Price | Priced on | Example, general niche |
|---|---|---|---|
| Integration | 1x | Average views per video | $240–$500 at 20,000 views |
| Dedicated video | 2x an integration | Average views per video | $480–$1,000 at 20,000 views |
| Pre-roll | 0.6x an integration | Average views per video | $144–$300 at 20,000 views |
| Short | 0.4x the rate per view | Average views per Short | $240–$500 at 50,000 views |
Integration
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 at 1x, the format our rates are calibrated to, and the one brands ask for most because it rides along on content your audience already showed up for.
Dedicated video
The entire video is the sponsorship. A full review, a build, a challenge structured around the product. It prices at 2x an integration on the same views, 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
A sponsor read at the very top, before the content starts, usually 30 to 60 seconds. It prices at 0.6x an integration on the same views, cheaper 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
A sponsored Short is priced on the Short's own views at 0.4x the long-form rate per view, 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 with no room to build a case for a product, and a web address typed into a Short's description is not clickable. YouTube does let you add one clickable link to the brand's site, shown as an on-screen sticker and in the description, but only on a Short that is part of a brand deal the brand has reported to YouTube. If you cannot find the brand when you go to add it, ask them to report the deal. Brands also often buy Shorts as a flat fee or bundled with a long-form video, so treat the per-view price as a starting point.
If your channel is Shorts-first, price Shorts on your Shorts views, not on your long-form average.
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.
Price both on views instead:
| Channel | Avg. views per video | Integration, general niche |
|---|---|---|
| A: 50K subs, 200K views | 200,000 | $2,400–$5,000 |
| B: 50K subs, 10K views | 10,000 | $120–$250 |
Priced on subscribers, both would quote the same number, and one of them would be wrong by twenty times. Priced on views, A quotes $2,400 to $5,000 and B quotes $120 to $250, and both numbers survive a brand checking the channel.
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. YouTube has not said how much this changes long-form counts, so treat the size of any jump as unknown. If your last 10 uploads straddle that date, the newer ones may 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. The public count also includes views from ads, so a video a brand has paid to promote can show more views than it earned on its own. Leave boosted videos out of your average.
Engagement: the argument, not the price
Views tell a brand how many people saw the video. Engagement tells them whether anyone cared. Our model does not multiply the price by it, because we could not find published rate data that puts a number on how much it adds. Use it in the pitch instead: the all-niche YouTube median is 3.06% of views, so a rate above that is a reason to quote the top of your range and to put the number in your media kit.
Niche: some audiences are worth several times more
Not all thousand-view 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:
| Niche | Per 1,000 views | Integration at 20,000 views |
|---|---|---|
| Finance & Business | $35–$70 | $700–$1,400 |
| Technology | $25–$50 | $500–$1,000 |
| Education | $18–$35 | $360–$700 |
| Health & Fitness | $18–$35 | $360–$700 |
| Beauty & Fashion | $18–$35 | $360–$700 |
| Travel | $15–$30 | $300–$600 |
| Food & Cooking | $15–$30 | $300–$600 |
| Lifestyle | $12–$25 | $240–$500 |
| Entertainment | $8–$18 | $160–$360 |
| Gaming | $8–$18 | $160–$360 |
Our rate per 1,000 average views for a 60 to 90 second integration, by niche. The calculator's niche menu has more options than this table, and those borrow the closest rate: fashion uses beauty, sports uses entertainment, and general, animals, arts and design use lifestyle.
Finance to entertainment is 4.2x at the midpoint on identical views, before the view count even comes into it.
These are sponsorship rates, 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 rate. A brand's first move after reading your rate is to open your channel.
Run Your Own Numbers Through the CalculatorThe 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 line item that's easiest to give away for free, 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 $700 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 help you here. YouTube's brand partner access is how a brand links your video to its Google Ads account, so it can see the video's numbers and boost it as an ad. You can start it three ways: pick a deal the brand has already reported (open to any creator), search for the brand, or generate a code and send it (those two are Partner Program only). The brand can also send the request from its end. Either way you have to agree, which gives you a point where you can price it before you do. It is not a full lock: YouTube says that after you remove access the video may still be promoted in other ad contexts, and it tells creators to settle usage rights with the advertiser directly. So put paid use in the contract, not only in Studio. 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 averaging 20,000 views a video. The brand wants an integration, plus whitelisting, plus 30 days of exclusivity against competing products.
- Base: 20,000 / 1,000 x $35 (the tech midpoint) = $700
- Format, integration at 1x: unchanged at $700
So the content fee is $700. Across the full tech range rather than the midpoint, that's $500 to $1,000, which is the honest way to quote it.
Now the add-ons, applied to the $700 content fee:
- Whitelisting: +150%, so +$1,050
- Exclusivity, 30 days: +20%, so +$140
All-in: $1,890.
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 $700" and agreed to everything else as part of the package, you would have delivered $1,890 of value for $700, and set an anchor you'd be fighting for the next two years.
Price Your Deal Including Add-OnsThe 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
YouTube is priced per view and the other platforms per follower, so there is no like-for-like rate to line up. What you can compare is deals at a stated size: the Instagram vs YouTube comparison does exactly that.
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. YouTube's Partner Program changes page groups Creator Partnerships with the products that open at 500 subscribers, with either 3,000 qualified watch hours in the last year or 3 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. The ad-revenue bar for new creators rises on February 1, 2027, but YouTube says Creator Partnerships eligibility does not change.
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 FTC holds you and the brand responsible together, but YouTube acts on your video and your channel: it says it may remove undisclosed branded content or add the label itself, and that violations can affect your Partner Program eligibility. 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?
It depends on views, not the 100K. A video averaging 15,000 views (15% of subscribers) prices at $180 to $375 for an integration in a general niche and $375 to $750 in tech. A dedicated video is 2x that. Check your average views per video over your last 10 uploads; that is the number to price from.
What is the average sponsorship rate per 1,000 YouTube subscribers?
There isn't a meaningful one, because brands do not price YouTube per subscriber. They price per view: our rates run $8 to $70 per 1,000 average views for a standard integration depending on niche, a dedicated video is 2x, a pre-roll 0.6x, and a Short 0.4x the per-view rate on its own views. These are our estimates, built from published agency rate cards and rates creators have shared publicly, not anything YouTube publishes.
Should I price a YouTube sponsorship on subscribers or views?
Views, in almost every case. YouTube's own help pages say your subscriber count reflects how many people have hit the subscribe button, and that it isn't always the same as your active audience. A subscriber can stop watching without ever unsubscribing, so the count alone doesn't tell you who's still there. Use your average views per video across your last 10 uploads at your niche's rate per 1,000 views. 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?
Two variables do most of the work: average views per video and niche. Views can differ twenty times between two channels of the same size, and niche moves the rate per view 4.2x from entertainment to finance. Engagement then decides where inside the range a brand will settle.
