The one thing to know this week

SAMY paid at least $100 million for Get Engaged, the agency behind DoorDash's 50 Cent campaign, and it wasn't the only creator-economy deal this week. The bet behind the price is that brand money is moving from TV to creators.

A social agency whose best-known campaign ran without a national Super Bowl TV buy just sold for at least $100 million, in a week full of creator-economy deals. So we checked where brand money actually lands on 55 of YouTube's biggest channels, and no single brand owns the top tier.

Keep reading to find out

why Nielsen is working with MrBeast on TV-style ratings for creators

what TikTok launched for advertisers at Advertising Week

why How I Built This is leaving NPR and heading to YouTube

which travel app turns up on more of the biggest channels than any other sponsor

how a prediction market ended up on more channels than five sportsbook and fantasy brands combined

Let's get into it.

This week's deep dive

SAMY Pays $100M+ for the Agency Behind DoorDash's 50 Cent Campaign

The deal. On Tuesday Fortune reported that SAMY, the Madrid-based social agency majority-owned by the private equity firm Bridgepoint, has bought Get Engaged, an Atlanta agency that makes social and creator campaigns. Co-founder Cam Fordham told Fortune it was a “low nine-figure” deal in cash and stock, meaning at least $100 million, and it closed on September 30. SAMY hasn't published a price; MediaPost says terms weren't disclosed.

Who they are. Get Engaged was founded in 2016 and has more than 120 people across Atlanta, New York, Nashville and Los Angeles, and Fortune reports its revenue grew 40% in the past year. Its clients include Sephora, DoorDash, Raising Cane's, NBCUniversal, EA and Perplexity. It's best known for DoorDash's “Beef 101” campaign with 50 Cent, which launched ahead of the Super Bowl in February without a national in-game TV buy and still became one of the most talked-about ads of the game.

“We weren't looking for someone to come in and fix what we had built.”

Ben Hiott, co-founder, Get Engaged, to Fortune

Why the price. That's the bet SAMY is paying for. Fortune's headline puts it plainly: brands are fleeing TV for social. It cites estimates that linear TV's share of global ad spend fell from 41.3% in 2013 to a projected 12.4% in 2025. For SAMY, which has about 1,200 people in more than 55 markets, the deal is also its big push into the U.S.

Not the only deal. The global sports, music and entertainment company THE·TEAM bought London's Outreach Talent Group, whose roster includes Jess Breach and Montel McKenzie. It's THE·TEAM's fourth creator acquisition this year, after J1S, Long Haul and Provisions in May. And Jake Paul's venture firm Anti Fund is seeking $400 million for a new fund, according to a regulatory filing first reported by Axios, more than 13 times its $30 million first fund. The advisory firm Quartermast counted 70 creator-economy acquisitions in the first half of 2026, up 23% from a year earlier, and about one in five was an agency.

Zooming Out

Private equity and big agency groups are now paying nine figures for the shops that make creator campaigns, and the people who manage creators are consolidating too. That puts more creator work in the hands of fewer, bigger companies, just as brands write their 2027 plans. The open question is where all that money lands, so we checked.

The story behind the numbers

From Our Data

No Brand Owns YouTube's Top Tier

If brand money is moving from TV to creators, where does it land at the top of YouTube? We took 55 of the biggest creator-led channels on YouTube, starting with MrBeast at 520 million subscribers, and went through every long-form video they posted from April through September: 2,356 in all. A video counts as sponsored when the brand's link sits at the top of the description and the sponsor is either credited there or read out on camera. The answer is a long list of 140 brands, mostly apps and direct-to-consumer companies, and none of them is on more than 7 of the 55. — 140

brands

7 of 55

widest reach

50%

tech uploads sponsored

9%

entertainment uploads sponsored

Saily, the travel eSIM app from the company behind NordVPN, has the widest reach: Veritasium, Linus Tech Tips, Kurzgesagt, How Ridiculous, Mrwhosetheboss, Good Mythical Morning and PewDiePie. The live-shopping app Whatnot is on five channels, with the same giveaway offer on Airrack, FaZe Rug, Preston, The Game Theorists and VanossGaming. Chime, NordVPN and Shopify are on four each, and 16 more brands are on two.

How often a channel sells depends on what kind of channel it is. Tech, science and interview channels sponsored half their uploads: Veritasium sold 13 of its 14 videos, and Linus Tech Tips sold 107 of 131 to 38 different brands, led by the charger maker UGREEN and the networking company Meter. The 46 entertainment channels sponsored 9%, and 21 of them, including Gordon Ramsay, SSSniperWolf and James Charles, ran no sponsor at all in six months.

Even MrBeast sold one video at a time: from April through August the channel sold 6 of its 12 uploads to six different brands, Shopify, Square, The Sheep Detectives, Motrin, Lowe's and Call of Duty: Mobile, one video each. In September Google signed a multi-year deal with Beast Industries, and it's the only brand that has come back since.

Why it matters

Nobody has locked up the top of YouTube, which is good news for any brand moving budget out of TV. Tech and science channels sell half their videos, so a slot there is a competition, and the brands that win one, like Saily, tend to spread across several channels at once. The entertainment giants sell fewer than one video in ten, so the biggest audiences are the least sold. If repeated presence on one of them is the goal, plan for a partnership, the way Google did with MrBeast, not a single booking.

Links Roundup

Quick hits from across the web

Nielsen's CFO Jessica Holscott told Bloomberg that Nielsen is working with MrBeast and other top creators on a standard way to measure creator content, so advertisers can compare a creator buy directly with TV and streaming. It's a plan, not a product yet, but a Nielsen rating is what TV budgets are planned on.

At Advertising Week, TikTok opened its ad network of nearly 400,000 outside apps to U.S. advertisers and launched in-app checkout and AI shopping tools, so TikTok ads can now follow viewers off TikTok.

Advertising Week also made creator Dhar Mann its first chief creator officer, with a goal of sparking $100 million in creator and brand deals, and Mann says CMO pledges already cover it, a claim worth checking against the deals that actually get announced.

Guy Raz bought How I Built This outright from NPR. Vox Media will sell its ads, and video episodes start on YouTube this fall, which means a new seller and a new format for one of the biggest business podcasts.

Goalhanger, home of The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is Football, is taking all its ad sales in-house from January 2027, a loud signal that a big enough creator network would rather own the sponsor relationship than rent it out.

MrBeast's grocery-store challenge, the second video in Google's deal with Beast Industries, has every contestant wearing a Fitbit Air, and MrBeast says it's his most-viewed video ever in its first 24 hours. It passed 125 million views in three days.

Partner message Before you call a video a hit, open it on YouTube: the ThoughtLeaders Chrome extension, free to download, shows how that upload is doing against the rest of the channel, right on the watch page.

Creator on the Rise · add to your watch list

Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime

1.25M subscribers • True-crime interviews

Sep 2025: 289M

Jul 2026: 980M

Lifetime channel views

Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime sits down with the people who lived the stories, from cartel investigators to reality-TV bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman in August, for long interviews. Brands stay, too: the mattress brand GhostBed has sponsored dozens of its videos since 2024 and is still running, the digital-security app Aura has kept coming back since 2021, and since August several brands new to the channel have signed on, including Zocdoc and Ridge.

Top country

United States 72%

Audience age

35-44

median age

Gender split

Male 77% · Female 23%

Reach

+63%

subscribers in 12 months

Partner with the channel →

Advertiser Spotlight

Brand Strategies Worth Stealing

Kalshi Is Now on More Channels Than Five Sportsbooks Combined

Last September, prediction market Kalshi sponsored videos on 6 YouTube channels. This September it's on 100, with 613 sponsored videos, counted the same way as the top-55 study above. Over the same twelve months, the five big sportsbook and fantasy brands, DraftKings, FanDuel, Underdog, Sleeper and BetMGM, went from 148 channels combined to 59. Kalshi alone is on more channels than all five put together.

It isn't a straight swap. 95 of Kalshi's 100 channels had no sportsbook sponsor a year ago. Saturday Morning Inspection is one of the few that did, and it kept the sentence: last September its Dolphins videos were “sponsored by Draft Kings Sports Book,” and this September they're “sponsored by Kalshi.” More than half of Kalshi's channels aren't about sports at all: markets and crypto shows, political commentary from Ben Shapiro to Triggernometry, and culture channels like TigerBelly and Blaire White.

The read worth studying puts the product inside the show. On Ben Shapiro's show the host cites a forecast mid-segment, “according to our friends and sponsors over at Kalshi,” and the odds become part of the point being made, not a break from it. That works anywhere the audience already argues about how things will turn out, which is the common thread across football, markets and politics channels.

Of the 333 channels Kalshi first sponsored long enough ago to judge, it has come back to 61 (18%) at least 70 days later; several videos bought at once count as one buy. 227 of its 560 channels started too recently to call, so Kalshi isn't yet what we call a guide brand. The steal: find the audiences that already debate outcomes, wherever they live, and write the read so the host can use your product to make a point.

Guide brands worth studying

SeatGeek. The ticket marketplace usually gives each creator a personal code link, and it came back to 29% of the channels it had time to return to (107 of 364) at least 70 days later.

Raycon. The earbud brand gives each creator a unique URL, most of its reads are spoken on camera, and it came back to 25% of the channels it had time to return to (269 of 1,089) at least 70 days later.

Trending on YouTube

What's going viral right now

A Former CIA Officer's Gas-Station Rule Went Huge

34x

the channel's usual views at day 3

Jason Hanson teaches personal safety, and last Friday the channel posted a four-minute video about the five-second check to do before getting out of the car at a gas station. Three days in it had 1.4 million views, 34 times what the channel's other videos since late August had at the same age, and it's past 1.5 million. Watch the rule.

A Music Teacher Sang Fleetwood Mac in an Airport

33x

the channel's usual views at day 5

Guitarist DØVYDAS posted a video on September 30 in which a music teacher at an airport asks for Fleetwood Mac and then sings it, and it had 1.2 million views by day five, 33 times the channel's typical video at the same point. Watch the performance.

A Sponsored Fry Bread Recipe Did 14 Times the Channel's Usual

14x

the channel's usual views at day 6

The Hillbilly Kitchen posted a two-ingredient Navajo fry bread recipe on September 29, and by day six it had 693,000 views, 14 times the channel's typical video at the same age. It was also a sponsored video: “Thanks to Graza for sponsoring this video!” sits at the top of the description, so the olive oil brand Graza happened to buy the channel's breakout week. Watch the recipe.

Geography By Geoff Broke Out on Day Four

6.6x

the channel's usual views at day 6

Geography By Geoff's video on Western Australia started like any other upload, roughly level with the channel's norm after three days. Then it doubled almost every day, reaching 3.1 million at day six, 6.6 times the channel's usual at that age, and it's now past 4.7 million. Watch the explainer.