The one thing to know this week

From October 21, online-gambling brands certified by Google can buy the ad at the top of YouTube's homepage. On creators' channels, casino sponsorships are shrinking: 106 channels ran one in September 2025, and 57 did this August.

Next Wednesday, Google starts letting casino and other online-gambling brands buy the top of YouTube's homepage, its most prominent ad slot. So we went looking for those same brands on creators' channels and found far fewer than a year ago, while prediction markets keep growing on a different set of channels.

Keep reading to find out

why Meta stopped taking TikTok's ads in seven countries

why the biggest creators are cutting their brand rosters

why a YouTuber with 15 million subscribers says a casino contract stops him from posting

why Warner Music is suing Oakley's owner over influencer posts

Let's get into it.

This week's deep dive

YouTube Will Sell Its Homepage to Online Gambling

The change. On October 7, Google posted a short policy notice: from October 21, advertisers certified under its Gambling and games policy can run online-gambling ads in the YouTube Masthead, the full-width ad at the top of the homepage. Google says the change “expands upon the platform's existing allowance for sports betting,” which has been allowed in that slot since 2022. The notice names no countries and no specific products. Beyond certification, it says only that the ads must follow every legal, jurisdictional and age restriction.

Certification is the gate. YouTube banned gambling from the Masthead entirely in 2021, then let sports betting back in a year later and daily fantasy sports in 2023. What decides who gets in is Google's gambling certification, and Google tightened it in September: accounts with repeated gambling violations can no longer apply for new certificates. Creators have lived behind the same gate since March 2025, when YouTube stopped them from naming, linking to or showing the logos of gambling sites Google hasn't certified, and put age limits on online-casino videos.

The influencers. The pressure on the people who promote gambling is international. In Greece, 18 influencers face criminal complaints for promoting unlicensed gambling sites, and on October 6 the country's Finance Minister, Kyriakos Pierrakakis, singled them out in a speech at the gambling regulator.

“The internet is not a jungle. Popularity does not confer immunity, and influence entails responsibility.”

Kyriakos Pierrakakis, Greek Finance Minister, via iGaming Expert

A busy week in Washington. Prediction markets, the apps where people trade on the outcome of games and news events, had their own week. On October 9 the CFTC, the federal regulator that oversees them, issued a rule stating that casino-style gambling, including sportsbook bets and casino games, is not one of the swap contracts it regulates. A day earlier, CNBC reported that the NFL and 39 states plus Washington, D.C. had asked the Supreme Court to take up New Jersey's case against Kalshi, in which the state wants to regulate Kalshi's sports contracts as gambling. The league said football made up $1.8 billion of prediction-market trading on the season's first Sunday.

Two different lists. Google treats prediction markets as their own category: since January they can advertise in the US under a separate policy limited to federally regulated platforms in most US states, and the October notice doesn't mention them. So the brands about to be able to buy YouTube's most visible ad slot and the brands that actually sponsor creators may turn out to be two different groups. We wanted to know how different, so we checked.

Zooming Out

Licensed casinos get YouTube's most visible ad slot, while regulators go after the influencers who promote unlicensed sites and prediction markets sit under rules of their own. That splits gambling on YouTube into very different advertisers: certified operators buying platform inventory, prediction markets buying creators, and everyone else facing tighter limits on where they can advertise.

The story behind the numbers

From Our Data

Casinos Faded. Prediction Markets Grew.

If YouTube is opening its homepage to gambling brands, how often do those brands already sponsor creators? We went through every long-form video and live stream from September 2025 to September 2026 that promoted one of more than 40 online, sweepstakes and crypto casino brands, or the casino side of sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel. A video counts when the creator reads the casino sponsor out on camera, or puts the brand's link or code in the description with a sponsor credit or promo. — 106

channels with a casino sponsor, Sept 2025 — 57

channels with one, Aug 2026 — 127

Polymarket videos, Sept 2026

6 of 10

Polymarket's top 10 since June on Logan Paul

Casino sponsors are fading. In September 2025, casino brands sponsored 328 videos across 106 channels. By August 2026, the last full month we can count, that was down to 128 videos on 57 channels, and September so far stands at 86 on 39. Sweepstakes casinos, the free-to-play casino apps that pay out prizes, such as Chumba, LuckyLand and SpinQuest, fell hardest: from 155 videos on 32 channels to 13 on 6. Over the year, DraftKings' casino was the biggest name, in 423 videos across 119 channels, and just ten channels carried 44% of all the casino videos.

Prediction markets grew on other channels. Of the 122 channels that ran a casino sponsorship from June to September, two also ran a Kalshi read and none ran a Polymarket one. Kalshi, which we covered last week, is the bigger of the two, on about five times as many channels. Polymarket sponsored 127 long-form videos in September, more than in any other month of the past year and more than five times June's 23, on 21 channels, down from 46 in January. So each channel is running more reads: about six a month, up from two. Much of September's jump came from sports and fantasy channels like the On3 college-football network and Flock Fantasy.

Logan Paul carries the views. Six of Polymarket's ten most-viewed sponsored videos since June are on Logan Paul's channel, led by a video past 3 million views, most with his code in the description and one read as blunt as “Polymarket paid for this. This is an ad.” The rest of the top ten includes the gaming streamer Asmongold, who thanked Polymarket for a month-long sponsorship, and the comedian turned commentator Russell Brand.

Why it matters

Casino brands were pulling back from creators before this rule: their sponsored videos fell by more than half in a year. The creator reads that are growing belong to prediction markets, which the new Masthead rule doesn't cover. The question for next year is whether the licensed casinos that can now buy the homepage start booking creators too.

Links Roundup

Quick hits from across the web

Meta has stopped taking ads from TikTok owner ByteDance in seven countries, including the US and Canada, and is turning away other advertisers' campaigns that send people to TikTok, so any Instagram ad ending in “follow us on TikTok” is worth a second look.

The YouTuber Jack Doherty, who has about 15 million subscribers, says a contract he signed with the crypto casino Shuffle bars him from posting. Shuffle's founder, Noah Dummett, confirmed a “six month term” and called it “money well spent,” and Doherty says he's working with lawyers to get out of it.

YouTube Shopping launched in France on Tuesday with Amazon among the first retail partners, and Blog du Modérateur says French creators need only 500 subscribers to join, a low bar for brands hunting affiliate partners there.

The biggest creators are cutting their brand rosters and asking the partners they keep for equity and product input, Digiday reports, with TikTok and podcast creator Alix Earle saying she'd rather work with “five or six brands than 100 every year.”

Warner Music sued Oakley owner Luxottica over at least 427 songs used in its social videos, and Digital Music News reports that part of the claim covers posts by influencers the brands commissioned.

YouTube will cut the reach of Shorts channels that mostly re-upload other creators' clips without significant changes, Creator Insider said on October 1, so a clip-channel Shorts package bought today may deliver less than it used to.

Partner message Found a channel you like? Open it on YouTube: the ThoughtLeaders Chrome extension, free to download, lets you put together a sponsorship proposal right on the channel page, with the integration type, price, views guarantee and date.

Creator on the Rise · add to your watch list

The Military Show

2.3M subscribers • Military analysis

The Military Show breaks down the war in Ukraine, NATO and the US-China standoff in long explainers, close to 19 long-form videos a week, and it has doubled its subscribers in two years. Its video on the attack on Moscow passed 1.38 million views in under three weeks, about ten times what its videos usually reach at the same age. Brands like Private Internet Access, Odoo and the strategy game Supremacy have run reads here.

92%

Male

United States

41.0%

United Kingdom

7.4%

India

7.2%

Australia

7.0%

Subscribers

2.3M +102% in 2 yrs

Median age

55-64

Projected views — 89K

Partner with the channel →

Advertiser Spotlight

Brand Strategies Worth Stealing

Graza Took Olive Oil to the News Desk

Graza makes the squeeze-bottle olive oil you've probably seen on a cooking channel. Over the past 12 months its sponsorship was read out on camera in 160 videos and live streams across 82 channels, and the surprise is where. Alongside the steak channel Guga, Tasting History and Sous Vide Everything, it bought reads through the winter on political and news shows like MeidasTouch and Pod Save America.

The reads we checked each carry the host's own code, MIDAS on MeidasTouch and MAX10 on Tasting History, so each show's sales can be counted on their own. The biggest placements are cooking ones, Mav's truck-camping video past 1.9 million views and a Sous Vide Everything video past 1.8 million, but a MeidasTouch episode past 1.3 million shows the politics shows bring real reach too. The reads peak before the holidays, when they push Graza's two-bottle gift set, and picked up again in September on food and home channels rather than politics shows.

“Graza is my olive oil of choice and it has been, by the way, since even before they came on as a sponsor.”

MeidasTouch host, in a sponsored episode

Graza has come back to 5 of the 87 channels it had time to return to at least 70 days later, counting several videos bought at once as one buy, so most of these reads are too fresh to be proven and Graza isn't yet what we call a guide brand. The steal: if your buyer cooks at home, a politics show can reach them too, and Graza tested both at once with a code on each.

Guide brands worth studying

Wildgrain. The bake-from-frozen bread box reaches the same politics and cooking audience as Graza, on shows like The David Pakman Show, The Bulwark and Tasting History, with a link made for each creator. It came back to 36% of the channels it had time to return to (91 of 253) at least 70 days later.

Quince. The direct-to-consumer clothing and home brand had sponsored reads on more than 1,000 channels in 12 months, usually with its own shop link and code for each creator, and it came back to 30% of the channels it had time to return to (312 of 1,037) at least 70 days later.

Trending on YouTube

What's going viral right now

A 1982 Pac-Man Toy Became a Retro Hit

102x

the channel's usual views at day 7

Retro-toy channel GenXGrownUp played Tomy's 1982 PAC-MAN tilting-maze toy for the first time after viewers asked for it. It reached 1.1 million views in its first week, about 100 times what the channel's videos usually do, and is now past 1.29 million. Watch the video.

Dead Meat's Kill Count Took On Obsession

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the channel's usual views at day 3

Horror channel Dead Meat's Kill Count, a comic tally of every on-screen death in a movie, took on the new film Obsession and passed 2.2 million views in four days. It's sponsored by Zocdoc. Watch the video.

The Organisms That Eat Plastic

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Science explainer Anton Petrov opened on a crab trapped in a plastic bottle off Japan, then walked through living organisms that are starting to consume plastic waste. It's past 3.4 million views in nine days. Watch the video.

A £290 Pig Turned Into 3.1 Million Views

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the channel's typical video

Nigel Lewis walked through what he makes back on a pig he paid £290 for, and the 37-minute video passed 3.1 million views in 11 days, about 11 times a typical video on the channel and nearly three times its previous best. Watch the breakdown.

Skip Bayless and Shannon Sharpe Reunited

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views in two weeks

Shannon Sharpe and Skip Bayless argued sports for years as co-hosts of Fox Sports 1's Undisputed. Their reunion on Sharpe's podcast Club Shay Shay, drew nearly 2.8 million views in two weeks, against 357,000 to 1.6 million for the channel's full episodes in July. It carries a read for the fantasy-sports app PrizePicks. Watch the episode.