The first number on a YouTube channel is its subscriber count, and it says the least about what your sponsored video will get. Subscribers pile up over years. Plenty of them subscribed to a video they liked in 2021 and have not watched since. What a brand buys is the next video, so the number that matters is how many people watch a typical upload now.
We measured how far apart those two numbers are. We drew 2,800 US channels that post in English at random from Streamforge’s creator index, 400 at each size from 1,000 subscribers to over a million, and took every long-form video each one published between October 2025 and September 2026. A channel’s typical video is its median: the one in the middle when its videos are lined up by views.
A typical video reaches about one subscriber in twenty
Show the numbers
| Subscribers | Typical video's views as % of subscribers (median channel) |
|---|---|
| 1K-10K | 5.7 |
| 10K-50K | 4.4 |
| 50K-100K | 4.4 |
| 100K-250K | 4.8 |
| 250K-500K | 4 |
| 500K-1M | 3.8 |
| 1M+ | 1.9 |
From 1,000 subscribers to a million, the typical long-form video drew between 4% and 6% of the channel’s subscriber count. Above a million it fell to about 2%. About two-thirds of the channels below a million subscribers had a typical video under a tenth of their subscriber count, and above a million it was four in five.
Here is what that looks like in views.
| Subscribers | Middle channel’s subscribers | Its typical video | Middle half of channels |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1K to 10K | 4,700 | 250 views | 70 to 1,150 |
| 10K to 50K | 18,700 | 970 views | 170 to 3,600 |
| 50K to 100K | 68,600 | 3,000 views | 650 to 11,300 |
| 100K to 250K | 152,000 | 7,100 views | 1,800 to 24,000 |
| 250K to 500K | 335,000 | 14,200 views | 2,700 to 39,200 |
| 500K to 1M | 660,000 | 24,800 views | 5,500 to 83,300 |
| Over 1M | 1,750,000 | 39,800 views | 11,400 to 154,800 |
The last column is the useful one. Among channels with 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers, the middle half had typical videos anywhere from about 1,800 to 24,000 views. Two channels with the same subscriber count can be more than ten times apart, and the subscriber count gives no hint which one you are looking at. In every band from 10,000 to a million subscribers, a quarter of channels had a typical video below about 1% of their subscribers.
Averages flatter. A channel’s mean views per video ran about 1.6 times its median for channels over 100,000 subscribers, and about twice the median under 50,000. One video that takes off drags the average up, and your sponsored video is more likely to land near the median. An average views filter is a fine way to cut a long list down. For the last few names, look at the median of their recent uploads.
Judge Shorts on their own. Since March 31, 2025, YouTube counts a Shorts view every time a Short starts to play or replays, with no minimum watch time. A Short’s view and a long video’s view are not the same unit. Among the channels in our sample that posted at least five of each, the typical Short drew 2.7 times the views of the typical long video for channels under 10,000 subscribers, and 1.2 to 1.5 times for channels over 50,000. If the brief is a 60-second read inside a long video, price it on long-form views.
Where to find YouTube creators
There are four good places to look. The first two cost nothing but time. The last two are faster and let you filter before you read.
Start from videos, not channels. Search YouTube the way your customer would: the problem your product solves, “best [category] for [use]”, “[product] review”, “[product] vs [competitor]”. The channels behind the videos that rank for buying questions already have an audience that asks them. Run a dozen searches, keep to recent uploads, and write down the channels that keep coming up, not the single videos. A channel that shows up for five of your searches is worth more of your time than one with a single viral hit.
Follow the audience sideways. Good channels lead to other good channels. Look at who a creator collaborates with, who they mention, and which creators their commenters bring up. This is slow, but it turns up smaller channels whose viewers trust them, which is the point of the exercise.
Look at who your competitors already sponsor. A competitor’s sponsored video means another brand has already checked the fit and paid for it. Read the sponsor lines in video descriptions (“sponsored by”, “thanks to [brand] for sponsoring”) and the chapters marked as ads, and note which brands come back to the same creator. Our guide to finding the creators your competitors sponsor covers the manual method. In Streamforge, Brand Watcher keeps that list for you.
Market timeline
Your competitors and market, day by day, newest first
Fri, Oct 9
Corsair ran a sponsored post with
Rap Techinstagram · 14.2K views
Thu, Oct 8
Razer ran a sponsored post with
always_a_failure_tiktok · 20.7K views
Tue, Oct 6
Corsair ran a sponsored post with
Hello Pixelsinstagram · 26.5K views
Search a creator database. A database lets you filter by country, language, size and audience before you read a single channel. Streamforge covers 48M creators. Its Discovery search filters YouTube channels by subscribers, average views and audience, among other things. Write down what you need before you search; our creator search brief is a one-page template for that.
Language includes
EnglishAge Ranges includes
18-24Games Played includes
Fortnite485 creators match
EpikWhale673K9.0%112703United States
deyyszn643K10.5%73396United States
Thiefs627K2.8%6301,291Canada
fnmoneymaker610K8.1%2041,057Sweden
venofn582K5.4%1,2855,960United Kingdom
Higgs520K5.8%8804,571United States
Muzz431K6.6%4292,055United States
pinqeu400K7.1%2741,421United Kingdom
OliverOG373K10.0%2144,731United States
Prospering350K3.1%3464,699United States
LEGIQN344K6.3%3062,860United States
You can also ask for the list in plain words. Streamforge has its own agent, native to the platform, that can do everything a user can do in the product, so the search, the shortlist and the step of adding creators to a campaign can be one request.
Find Twitch creators with 1M+ followers who play VALORANT and add the best 12 to my headset campaign
Add participants· 3 steps
Add 12 creator channels to “Headset launch”: 12 new participants, 0 merged into existing ones.
- Campaign
- Headset launch
- New participants
- 12
- Selected for
- Balanced fit and performance potential
- Merged into existing
- 0
- 1
tarik51 pieces of on-topic content51 pieces of on-topic content3.3M - 2
Valkyrae7 pieces of on-topic content7 pieces of on-topic content1.7M - 3
fuslie6 pieces of on-topic content6 pieces of on-topic content1.3M - 4
Ludwig4 pieces of on-topic content4 pieces of on-topic content3.8M - 5
DisguisedToast4 pieces of on-topic content4 pieces of on-topic content2.8M
Read a channel in five minutes
A search gives you names. These checks tell you which ones to email. They are in the order we would do them, because each one can rule a channel out before you spend time on the next.
1. Find the typical video. Open the channel’s Videos tab, which leaves out Shorts and past live streams, and look at the last 15 uploads. Put them in order by views and take the middle one. Compare it with the table above. A channel under a million subscribers whose middle video sits near 5% of its subscribers is normal. Well above that, it is doing better than most channels its size. Under 1%, the subscriber count is mostly history.
2. Check that the views are steady. Look at the spread of those 15 videos. If most of them sit near the middle one, you can plan on that number. If one or two videos carry the channel and the rest trail far behind, your video is more likely to look like the rest.
3. Count the uploads. How many videos went up in the last 90 days? A channel that posts every week can fit you in soon. One that posts once a month has few slots, and the next free one may be weeks away. A long silence followed by a burst is worth a question before you book.
4. Look for paid views. A view count can include views that someone paid for. A creator or a brand can promote a video with ads, and those viewers did not come from the channel’s audience. On TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, Streamforge flags posts whose views were inflated by a brand paying to promote them, and estimates how many views were paid for. The method was checked against campaigns where the real paid and organic split was known.
Estimated paid reach3 of 72 posts are boosted
677Kper boosted post
2.0Mtotal boosted views
neekolul994K followersBoostedGet rewarded IRL with @Razer Gold #Razer 🎁💛
SponsoredRazer· Paid sponsorship
- Views
- 2.0M
- Likes
- 858
- Organic views
- 13.0K
- Boosted views
- 2.0M
5. Check who is watching. Views only help if they come from your market. Look at where the audience lives, which language it speaks, and its age and gender. Streamforge’s audience analysis covers YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram and X. It is AI-based and does not require the creator to authenticate through OAuth. The model was trained on first-party audience data, and in Streamforge’s tests its results are extremely close to the platforms’ direct metrics. Our post on creator audience analysis goes through what to compare and how to read it.
Thiefs
@thiefs627K followers
Audience demographics
AI-enriched audience analysis for this creator.
- Top Country
- United States
- 52.3%
- Primary Gender
- Male
- 65.0%
- Largest Age Group
- 18-24
- 40.7%
- Top Language
- English
- 78.6%
Safety & Health
Audience Authenticity
Estimated real audience
5.0% suspected bots
Mixed6. Read the sponsorship history. Scroll the descriptions of the last few months of videos and list the sponsors. Three things matter. Has the creator done sponsorships at all, and do the reads sound like the creator or like a script? Did any brand come back for a second video? A brand that returns is the best reference a creator can have. And how crowded is it? A different sponsor in every video can wear an audience out; our guide on sponsorship saturation covers where that line sits.
7. Make sure the numbers are current. A view count from three months ago can miss a channel’s whole recent run, good or bad. Every creator in Streamforge has their own refresh schedule. How often depends on their size and, on most platforms, how actively they post. New YouTube and TikTok videos keep being re-checked in their first weeks, and Twitch streams are tracked while they are live. Opening a YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or X creator in the dashboard checks for newer data on the spot.
MrBeast@mrbeast521M followersFollowers
521M
Total views
143B
Then find the contact
Most channels list a business email on their About page, and some keep it behind YouTube’s “View email address” button. Our guide on finding a YouTuber’s business email goes through the places to look in order, and the one on YouTube’s business email limits covers what to do when the email is hidden or the button stops working. Before you write, check the channel against your own brief once more: the five minutes above are cheaper than a contract with the wrong channel.
The five-minute check, on one page
| Check | Where to look | A good sign | A reason to pause |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical video | The middle of the last 15 long-form uploads | Near or above 5% of subscribers (about 2% over 1M) | Under 1% of subscribers |
| Steadiness | The same 15 uploads | Most videos near the middle one | One or two videos carry the channel |
| Rhythm | Uploads in the last 90 days | A regular schedule | Long gaps, or a sudden burst |
| Paid views | A paid-reach flag on the channel’s videos | None flagged | Big videos that were promoted |
| Audience | Country, language, age | Your market and language | A different market from yours |
| Sponsors | Descriptions and ad chapters | Brands that came back | A new sponsor in every video |
| Freshness | When the numbers were last read | This month | Months old |
Subscriber counts still have a use. They tell you roughly which band a channel sits in and so which row of the table to compare against. Everything after that comes from the videos.
How we counted
We started from the US channels in Streamforge’s Discovery index that post in English and published at least five long-form videos in the year to September 30, 2026, and drew 400 at random from each of seven subscriber bands: 2,800 channels in all. For each channel we read the views of every long-form video and Short it published from October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026, leaving out live streams. Subscriber counts are from the index as of October 20, 2026. View counts are as Streamforge last read them, a median of four weeks after each video went up. Leaving out the videos read less than 30 days after publishing does not change the result: on a check of 175 of the channels, the typical reach was 5.8% either way. A channel’s typical video is the median views of its long-form videos, and the figures above are the middle channel in each band. Channels with fewer than five long-form videos in the year, about 3% of the sample, are left out of the long-form figures. The Shorts comparison uses the channels with at least five long-form videos and five Shorts.
