Every autumn someone surveys creators about the holidays: how many brand deals they expect, when brands get in touch, what they plan to charge. A survey is a fair read of the mood. It is a weaker guide to planning, because what creators hope to book and what brands actually book are different numbers.
So we counted what was booked. In November 2025, US creators published more than 100,000 sponsored posts on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Twitch, from more than 44,000 accounts, for more than 14,500 brands. They are the same posts behind our Black Friday campaign timeline, which counted them day by day. This time we read them creator by creator and brand by brand, to see who got the deals.
Most creators worked with one brand
Show the numbers
| Brands in the month | Share of accounts (%) |
|---|---|
| One brand | 65.6 |
| Two brands | 19.1 |
| Three or four brands | 11.1 |
| Five or more brands | 4.1 |
Two in three of the accounts that ran a sponsored post last November worked with one brand all month. Fewer than one in twenty worked with five or more. Most did very little paid work at all: 56% of accounts had a single sponsored post in the month, and 2% had ten or more.
The busy few still carry a lot of the volume. The top tenth of accounts published 38% of the month’s sponsored posts. Those are the creators every brand’s shortlist finds first, and their November calendars fill early.
For a brand, the more useful finding is the size of the rest. More than 40,000 US accounts took at least one sponsorship last November, and most of them took just one. A creator with one sponsor in the month has room for another, and your post will not be the fourth ad their audience scrolls past that week. The sponsorship saturation guide covers how to check how often a creator promotes brands before you book.
Repeat partners carried two in five placements
Count each brand on each post once and November had 74,702 pairings of a brand with an account. Most were a single day’s work: only 15% of pairings posted on two or more different days. Those repeat pairings still carried 40% of all brand placements. Half of the repeat pairs had their first and last posts nine days apart or less, about the distance from an early-access post to a Black Friday one.
One post is the default holiday deal, then, but two in five placements came from a creator posting for the same brand again. A second post lets one creator do two jobs: announce the offer while people are still planning, then remind them on the day it starts. Book both dates in one contract, so the second one is not renegotiated in Thanksgiving week.
Identified12
tarikTwitch · 3.3M
ValkyraeTwitch · 1.7M
fuslieTwitch · 1.3M
LudwigTwitch · 3.8M
DisguisedToastTwitch · 2.8M
QuarterJadeTwitch · 1.2M
lilypichuTwitch · 2.4M
pokimaneTwitch · 9.4M
Outreach5
Unbox TherapyYouTube · 26M
SykkunoTwitch · 3.7M1
ironmouseTwitch · 2.6M
summit1gTwitch · 6.4M
NinjaTwitch · 19M
Negotiation3
T-PainTikTok · 5.4M1
EmiruTwitch · 2.2M2
TimTheTatmanTwitch · 7.6M
Contracted4
DrLupoTwitch · 4.4M1
ClixTwitch · 8.7M
SypherPKTwitch · 7.2M
LoserfruitTwitch · 3.0M
Live3
LIRIKTwitch · 3.0M3
RealKatieBTwitch · 674K
jasontheweenTwitch · 2.8M
Streamforge supports campaign operations alongside discovery and audience vetting, including creator CRM with custom stages, deliverables and deadlines, so a two-post deal stays one line on the board rather than two separate threads.
One in five creators had two sponsors in Thanksgiving week
In Thanksgiving week, November 24 to 30, 17,407 accounts ran a sponsored post. Of those, 19% had two or more brands paying for posts that week, and 5% had three or more. Most of the doubled-up creators spread the brands across separate posts; about one in six had them all in a single post.
That is the week your post is most likely to sit beside another brand’s. Two habits help. Before you book, look at who else has sponsored the creator recently, and whether any of them sell what you sell. Once you book, write a narrow exclusivity window into the contract: your category, for the days around your post, not a blanket ban on other work. The exclusivity guide covers how to word it so a creator can sign it.
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
Streamforge is an influencer marketing platform for creator discovery, audience analysis, competitive intelligence, campaign workflow, and data access by API. Brand Watcher is the competitive part, and it reads the same kind of sponsored posts this article counts.
Most brands worked with one creator
The brand side is spread even thinner. Of the brands with a sponsored post last November, 55% worked with one account all month and 81% with fewer than five. At the other end, 73 brands sponsored 100 or more accounts each, and the largest reached 1,403.
A brand running five creators was already in the top fifth of last November’s sponsors. You do not need a large program to be present in the season; most of the brands that were present ran one creator. What a small program cannot afford is a wasted slot, which is why the creator checks above matter more to it than to a brand booking a hundred.
Most sponsored TikToks were small
Two in three of the sponsored TikToks we counted from November had fewer than 10,000 views when we exported them in October 2026, close to a year later. The median had 2,267. A quarter passed 23,000, a tenth passed 207,000, and 4% passed a million.
The count, if anything, flatters the size. TikTok videos carrying the platform’s paid-partnership label were read at any view count, but other TikToks only once they passed 5,000 views, so small unlabelled sponsorships are missing. Holiday sponsorship on TikTok is mostly small creators making small posts, which is a reason to book several of them rather than wait on one large one.
Instagram’s numbers run higher, with a median near 40,600 views, but they cannot be set beside TikTok’s: only Instagram posts past 5,000 views were read.
A creator’s past sponsored views are the usual starting point for a fee, so it is worth knowing how many of those views were earned.
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
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. A creator whose last holiday sponsorship drew a million views, most of them paid for, will not reach a million for you unless you pay for them too.
Last November on one page
| Measure | November 2025 |
|---|---|
| Sponsored posts | More than 100,000 |
| Accounts with a sponsored post | 44,285: TikTok 28,568, Instagram 8,866, YouTube 6,489, Twitch 362 |
| Brands | More than 14,500 |
| Accounts with one sponsored post all month | 56% |
| Accounts with one brand all month | 66% |
| Share of posts from the busiest tenth of accounts | 38% |
| Brands with one account all month | 55% |
| Brands with 100 or more accounts | 73 |
| Brand and account pairings on two or more days | 15%, carrying 40% of placements |
| Accounts with two or more brands in Thanksgiving week | 19% |
| Median views of a counted sponsored TikTok | 2,267 |
| What we found | What to do this year |
|---|---|
| Most creators had one sponsor all month | Look past the busiest creators; most of the pool had room |
| Repeat pairings carried two in five placements | Put two dates per creator in one contract |
| One in five doubled up in Thanksgiving week | Check recent sponsors, and write a narrow category window |
| Most sponsored TikToks were small | Book several small creators, and price by what each reaches unpaid |
How we counted. These are the posts counted in our Black Friday campaign timeline: posts by creators based in the US who post in English, on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Twitch, from November 1 to 30, 2025 by US Eastern day. Streamforge’s AI names the brands in each post that carries sponsor wording, a promo code, a shopping link or a paid-partnership label, and we counted a brand only when the post’s own label or text ties it to payment for that post. An account is one profile on one platform, so a creator on TikTok and Instagram counts twice, while a YouTube channel’s long videos, Shorts and live streams count once. Brands are told apart by their web domain, and a placement is one brand on one post. Views are lifetime views at export in October 2026. In blind checks of random samples, each read separately by two AI reviewers, 146 of 150 counted TikTok and Instagram posts and 136 of 150 counted YouTube and Twitch posts plainly tied a brand to payment, and about nine in ten counted brand tags were judged paid. The rules miss more sponsorships than they wrongly count, and a spoken-only ad read leaves no trace in the text, so creators look a little less busy here than they were. Instagram photo posts carry no view count, so Instagram’s count is mostly Reels. X is not included.
