How to find brands that sponsor YouTube channels in your niche

The fastest way to find brands that will sponsor your YouTube channel is to list the brands that already sponsor the channels one size bigger than yours in the same niche, then rank them by how recently and how often they bought. A brand that sponsored two channels like yours in the last six months has a budget for your audience right now and a playbook for the format. That is a warmer pitch than any directory, and all of it is public: the paid-promotion label, the disclosure line in the description, the tracking link that resolves to the brand's domain.

I run a 105,000-subscriber DevOps tutorial channel, and on 26 October 2026 I did this exercise on my own niche with the free channel analyzer for YouTube I built: 9 cloud and DevOps channels between 84,000 and 1.5 million subscribers, 2,498 videos scanned, 435 of them sponsored, about 120 YouTube API units in total. This post is the method, the table it produced, the 16 brands that appear on more than one of those channels, what the data says about how often channels my size take sponsors, and the three things that broke along the way, including a limit I hit on my own tool.

What did the scan of 9 DevOps channels find?

All numbers are from the newest uploads of each channel (up to 300), as the YouTube Data API returned them on 26 October 2026. "Sponsored" means YouTube's paid-promotion label or a disclosure in the title or description. "Of last 30" is how many of the last 30 long videos were sponsored.

Channel	Subscribers	Videos scanned	Sponsored	Last sponsored	Of last 30	Brands that came back
TechWorld with Nana	1,500,000	186 (all, since 2019)	35	54 days ago	4	Kasten (7), Pulumi (6), Tailscale (3)
Abhishek Veeramalla	675,000	300 (since May 2025)	23	6 days ago	6	Google Cloud (5), KodeKloud (2), AWS (2)
KodeKloud	493,000	300 (since Apr 2026)	1	142 days ago	0	none
Travis Media	330,000	285 (all, since 2017)	150	236 days ago	23	Brilliant (17), Cast AI (4), Boot.dev (2)
Be A Better Dev	292,000	300 (since 2021)	10	902 days ago	0	Twingate (2)
Tech With Lucy	278,000	227 (all, since 2020)	161	4 days ago	26	HubSpot (11), Hostinger (5), Outskill (4)
Cloud With Raj	128,000	300 (since 2022)	5	91 days ago	2	Oracle (2)
DevOps and AI Toolkit	98,900	300 (since Jan 2024)	9	140 days ago	1	none
Bret Fisher	83,600	300 (since Dec 2020)	41	30 days ago	9	Uffizzi (6), Cast AI (3), Speechify (3)

The data points, as they are:

• 435 sponsored videos out of 2,498 scanned, about 17 percent. Across those 435, YouTube's paid-promotion label is on 138 and a written disclosure on 361; the label alone would miss two thirds.
• The spread is enormous: 0 of the last 30 videos on two channels, 26 of 30 on one. The median channel in this list had 4 of its last 30 long videos sponsored.
• 12 brands appear on two or more of the ten channels I can see (these nine plus my own), and 4 more bought three or more videos from a single channel. The most recent cross-channel buyers are MongoDB, Coder, Teleport, Hostinger, Kestra and Oracle, all with a sponsored video in the last five months.
• Four of my own seven sponsors (Oracle, Kestra, Teleport, Hostinger) also appear on at least one of these channels. The brands that bought my channel were already buying the niche.

How do I find the channels one size bigger than mine?

"One size bigger" means two to ten times your subscriber count, in a niche close enough that your viewers also watch them. Smaller than that and the brands are not buying yet; much bigger and the brand's budget for that creator is a different budget from the one that could reach you.

Four places to find them, in the order I used:

1. The channels your viewers already watch. In YouTube Studio, Analytics, Audience, the card "Other channels your audience watches" is the only list built from your actual viewers. Mine lists the DevOps channels above and a few AI channels. This card is private to you, which is why no tool can make it.
2. The search results for your own best keywords. Search YouTube for the five terms your top videos rank for, filter by Channel, and note every channel between 2x and 10x your size.
3. The brands you already had. Open the brand's YouTube search results ("sponsored by Oracle", "Oracle" with filter Channel) and the brand's own case-study pages. The other channels a brand sponsored are, by definition, channels a brand considers comparable to yours.
4. The featured channels and collaborations on the channels you found in steps 1 to 3. Nana's channel led me to DevOps Toolkit; Abhishek's to KodeKloud.

I started with ten handles and one was wrong. "@SaiyamPathak" is not that channel's handle, and the lookup returned "No YouTube channel matches that" after one API unit. The lesson is small but real: copy handles from the channel page, not from memory, because a wrong handle costs a lookup and on a tool with a per-hour limit, a lookup is not free.

Which brands are sponsoring DevOps and cloud channels right now?

This is the list I actually wanted. Every brand that appears on two or more of the ten channels I can see (the nine above plus my own), and the four that bought three or more videos from one channel, with the most recent sponsored video and how many videos it bought on each.

Brand	Channels it sponsored	Most recent	Notes
MongoDB	Abhishek Veeramalla, Cloud With Raj	16 Oct 2026	Named in both descriptions
Coder	Abhishek Veeramalla, Cloud With Raj	27 Jul 2026	Named in both, 18 days apart
Teleport	Cloud With Raj, Abhishek Veeramalla (link), and my own channel	22 Jul 2026	Three channels in 2025 and 2026
Hostinger	Tech With Lucy (5 videos, code TECHWITHLUCY), Travis Media (code TRAVISMEDIA), and my own channel (code RAHULWAGH)	26 Aug 2026	Buys per-creator discount codes across the niche
Kestra	Abhishek Veeramalla, and my own channel	28 Sep 2026	Named in both
Oracle	Cloud With Raj (2 videos), and my own channel (2 videos)	29 Sep 2026	Came back on both channels
Google Cloud	Abhishek Veeramalla (5 videos in 2 months)	20 Oct 2026	One channel, but a campaign, not a one-off
Cast AI	Travis Media (4), Bret Fisher (3), DevOps Toolkit (1)	9 Oct 2025	Three channels over two years
Warp	Travis Media (3), TechWorld with Nana (code NANA), Tech With Lucy	4 Mar 2026	Three channels
Twingate	Be A Better Dev (2), DevOps Toolkit, TechWorld with Nana (code NANA)	7 May 2024	Three channels, but nothing in the last two years
Pulumi	TechWorld with Nana (6 videos over 3.5 years, code NANA500)	10 Dec 2025	One channel, long relationship
Brilliant	Travis Media (17 videos in two years)	27 Jul 2025	The biggest single relationship in the data
HubSpot	Tech With Lucy (11 videos across 9 months since Oct 2024)	11 Oct 2026	The most active relationship right now
AWS	Abhishek Veeramalla (2), Tech With Lucy	1 Oct 2025	Named as sponsor on both
TryHackMe	Abhishek Veeramalla, Tech With Lucy	4 Jul 2026	Security training, buying developer audiences
Docker	Travis Media (2), Bret Fisher	20 Jul 2025	Paid-flagged videos, brand from the link; could be show notes

Two things stand out when you look at it as a creator with 105,000 subscribers rather than as a researcher.

First, the overlap with my own list is not a coincidence. Oracle, Kestra, Teleport and Hostinger each sponsored me and at least one channel on this list within the same twelve months. Brands with a developer-marketing budget run the same play on every channel in a niche band, usually through the same agency, often in the same quarter. If you are a creator in this niche who has not heard from them, it is not because they do not sponsor channels like yours. It is because you are not on the list they are working from, and the fix for that is to write to them with the other creator's video in the first line.

Second, the most recent column matters more than the brand name. HubSpot has bought 11 videos from one cloud-careers channel over two years, in nine different months, the last one on 11 October. Google Cloud bought 5 videos on one DevOps channel between 23 September and 20 October. Those are live campaigns with a person behind them who is approving invoices this month. Twingate sponsored three of these channels but nothing since May 2024; that budget may have moved on.

How often do channels my size take sponsors?

Less often than the loudest channels make it look, and the variation between two channels of the same size is bigger than the variation between sizes.

• Two channels in the list, KodeKloud (493,000) and Be A Better Dev (292,000), had no sponsored video in their last 30 long uploads. KodeKloud sells its own courses and has little reason to sell its audience to anyone else; Be A Better Dev has not uploaded in the last 90 days.
• Four channels sit between 1 and 6 of their last 30: Nana (4), Abhishek (6), Cloud With Raj (2), DevOps Toolkit (1). That is the normal band for a tutorial channel that takes sponsors but is not built around them. My own channel is at 8 of 30, at the top of that band.
• Two channels are built around sponsorship: Tech With Lucy at 26 of 30 and Travis Media at 23 of 30 before the uploads stopped in March 2026. Both are careers-and-commentary channels rather than tutorial channels, and brands buy that format in volume because the videos are shorter, more frequent and aimed at people choosing tools and courses.
• Bret Fisher is a special case: 40 of his 41 sponsored videos carry the label and almost none name a sponsor in text, because his uploads are weekly live streams with a sponsor read and show notes that link every tool discussed. More on what that did to my tool below.

If you are at 100,000 subscribers in a tutorial niche and taking one sponsor every month or two, you are on the normal curve for this list. The channels doing four a month are doing a different kind of video.

What do returning brands tell you?

A brand that comes back is the single most useful fact in this data, for both sides of the deal.

For a creator, a returning brand is proof that the first video produced something the brand could measure and that the measured number cleared whatever bar the brand had. Brilliant bought 17 videos from Travis Media between June 2023 and July 2025; Pulumi bought 6 from Nana between July 2022 and December 2025 with a dedicated code; Google Cloud bought 5 from Abhishek in two months. When you pitch a brand like that, you are not asking them to try something new. You are asking them to add one more channel to a format they have already paid for a dozen times, and your email can say exactly that.

For a brand or agency, the same column answers "does this channel deliver?" without asking the creator for a screenshot. A channel where brands come back is a channel where the integration worked well enough for someone to approve a second invoice. On Abhishek's channel three brands came back; on Lucy's, fifteen. On KodeKloud's, none, because there is nothing to come back to.

The analyzer shows this as a "returned N months" chip next to the last-seen date, counting the distinct calendar months in which the brand had a sponsored video on that channel. It is a count of months, not of videos: Google Cloud's 5 videos across September and October show as "returned 2 months", which is the honest version.

How do I turn the list into a pitch?

The list is the raw material. Here is how I turn it into ten emails, in the order I would write them.

1. Keep the brands that bought in the last six months. From the table above, that leaves MongoDB, Coder, Teleport, Hostinger, Kestra, Oracle, Google Cloud, HubSpot, TryHackMe and, at a stretch, Warp. Twingate and Cast AI go in a second list for a quarter from now.
2. Keep the brands whose product your audience actually uses. My viewers run Kubernetes and Terraform at work. MongoDB, Coder, Teleport, Kestra and Oracle fit. HubSpot buys cloud-careers audiences; a DevOps tutorial channel is a weaker fit, and the email should say why it fits anyway or not be sent.
3. Find the person, not the inbox. The sponsored video itself is the clue. The description's tracking link often carries the agency's domain; the brand's "creators", "partnerships" or "developer relations" page names the team; the person who commented on the sponsored video from the brand's account is a real human with a LinkedIn profile. "partnerships@" inboxes work less often than a named person.
4. Write three lines. The first names the other creator's video: "You sponsored Abhishek's MongoDB RAG labs video on 16 October." The second says who you are in numbers: subscribers, the median views of your last ten long videos, and the share of your viewers in the countries the brand sells to. The third proposes one specific video that uses their product the way your audience would, with a date you can deliver.
5. Attach proof of the comment section. Brands read the comments under the other creator's sponsored video before they read your email. Send them the number of questions under your own recent videos that you answered, and how fast. The free unanswered comments checker gives you that number for any channel in a minute, including theirs.
6. Order by recency, send two a day. Not ten in one morning. You want to be able to adjust the pitch after the first reply.

The codes in the table are a clue of their own. Hostinger issued TECHWITHLUCY, TRAVISMEDIA and RAHULWAGH. A brand that runs per-creator codes is measuring each creator on conversions, which means the pitch should talk about your viewers' intent to buy, not your view count.

What broke while I did this?

Three things, and the first one was on my own tool.

I hit my own rate limit. The analyzer allows five lookups an hour per visitor without an account, a guard that exists so a bot cannot drain the YouTube API quota the free tools share. On the sixth channel it told me, correctly, to wait an hour or sign in. I was doing exactly what an agency does on a vetting morning, and the limit is right for anonymous traffic and wrong for that person. Signed-in accounts get 30 lookups an hour, which covers a normal morning; the lesson for me is that the limit message should say so earlier than the sixth lookup, and for you it is to sign in before you start a batch. I finished the remaining lookups from my development machine, against the same API project, which is why the two halves of the table were scanned about ten minutes apart.

Live-stream channels read as a wall of sponsors. Bret Fisher's channel is weekly live streams, each one flagged as paid promotion, each one with show notes linking the tools discussed. The analyzer treats a link on a paid-flagged video as a medium-confidence sponsor, which on his channel produced 43 medium rows, including xkcd.com and martinfowler.com. Neither of those has ever sponsored anything. The first scan on 26 October listed 48 brands for his channel, 0 of them high confidence. I changed the rule the same afternoon: when a flagged video links to more than five outside sites, each link is only "possible", and the fix ships with this post. Even so, read a live-stream channel's list as "topics discussed" unless a brand is named in words or the paid flag coincides with a single link.

Link shorteners showed up as brands. Tech With Lucy's descriptions use tracking links on almost every video, and with 161 sponsored videos the scan ran out of the redirects it is allowed to follow in one lookup. The leftovers were shown by their shortener's name: a row called "Pxf" for pxf.io, "Bit" for bit.ly, "Tinyurl", "Skl" for skl.sh. The screenshot above still shows them, because that is what the report looked like when I took it. The fix, also shipping with this post: shorteners are followed first, twice as many redirects are followed per lookup, and a shortener that still could not be followed is dropped instead of shown as a brand.

The honest summary is that on tutorial channels with written disclosures (Abhishek, Nana, Cloud With Raj, my own) the sponsor list is reliable, and on channels that disclose by flag and link only, it is a list of leads to check by opening the example video. The tool says so on the page, and it is true.

What this means for you

• If you are a creator looking for your first or next sponsor: build this table for your niche this week. The brands sponsoring channels two to ten times your size are the brands that will sponsor you, in roughly the order of the "most recent" column.
• Pitch the format they already buy. A brand that has bought six tutorial integrations does not need convincing about the format, only about your audience.
• Codes mean conversions. A brand running per-creator discount codes will judge you on sales, so talk about intent and comments, not views.
• If you are a brand or agency: the same table tells you which of your competitors is already active in a niche, on which channels, and how recently. The "returned" column is the shortlist of channels that delivered for someone.
• Check the example video before you act on any row. On channels that disclose by flag and link only, half the rows are show notes.

Quick answers

Does YouTube have a list of brands that sponsor a channel?

No. There is a per-video paid-promotion label and whatever the creator wrote in the description. Every list of a channel's sponsors, including the one in the analyzer, is assembled from those two things plus the links.

How many subscribers do I need before brands will sponsor me?

Three of the nine channels in this table have under 130,000 subscribers and all three have taken sponsors. Bret Fisher, at 83,600, had 9 sponsored videos in his last 30. The brands in a developer niche buy audiences, not subscriber counts.

Should I contact the brand or wait for them?

Contact them. Every brand in the table found the channels it sponsors somehow, and the creators who appear on three brands' lists are not waiting.

Can I do this for a niche that is not tech?

Yes. The method is the same in cooking, fitness or finance; only the brand names change. The analyzer detects twenty niches and reads disclosures in the same way regardless.

What to do this week, no tool needed: open the "Other channels your audience watches" card in your own Studio analytics, pick the three channels there that are bigger than you, and read the descriptions of their last ten videos each. Write down every "sponsored by" line with its date. Thirty descriptions, one evening, and you have the start of the table above for your own niche.

ReplyDial's free channel analyzer for YouTube builds the full table for any public channel in about a minute, with the paid flag, the disclosure, the code and an example video for every brand, and a free account lets you save the reports and compare two channels side by side; ReplyDial itself is the inbox for answering your own channel's comments, which is the part of your channel a brand reads before it replies to your pitch.