What we do

With a rapidly growing audience, brands became increasingly interested in sponsoring this content. David turned to Dan, a former colleague from SimilarWeb, to help scale the project. Dan quickly began to make relationships with other content creators in order to meet the demand from eager advertisers.

ThoughtLeaders was officially founded. Michal, another SimilarWeb alumni was brought on board to build a tech platform to support the growing needs of the nascent company. In addition to newsletters, blogs, and podcasts, we began to sell sponsorships on YouTube.

With a steady stream of new clients (that included Fetch Rewards, Monday.com, MongoDB and Curiosity Stream) and an expanded network of creator partners, we started to really hit the ground running. In just one year, ThoughtLeaders experienced fourfold growth, and we’re proud to say that this expansion has been entirely bootstrapped—and continues to be to this day!

With the corona virus lockdowns, our company moved to fully remote working, along with the rest of the world. However, the pace of innovation did not slow down: we launched a data intelligence platform tracking sponsorships across longform digital content, whilst continuing to strengthen our media buying agency.

This year we added a fifth content channel to our platform, with the introduction of Twitch. Our data capabilities increased dramatically as we found a way to automatically transcribe all podcast episodes and YouTube videos as we added them to the platform. We used this to develop a proprietary AI model that uses NLP to accurately detect which mentions of brand names were sponsored and which were organic. On top of all of that, we also achieved $8 million in annual revenue!🎉

By this year, our headcount in Israel had grown so much that co-working spaces were no longer effective. We moved into brand new offices in the center of Tel Aviv, with our very own podcast studio that we offer free of charge to any local creators who want to come and use it. (You can book a slot here).

We launched the ThoughtLeaders Partner Program! This exclusive, invite-only network brings together top creators with a track record of excellence and expertise in YouTube sponsorships.  We believe this program will help us take YouTube sponsorships to the next level!