YouTube Sponsorship Finder — Which Brands Pay Which Creators

Point it at a channel and get every brand deal in its back catalogue: the sponsor, the tracked campaign link, the discount code, and the second the read starts.

Point it at a brand instead and get the reverse — every creator running that brand, which is how you map a competitor's entire influencer roster in one run.

No API key, no login, no YouTube Data API quota.

Why this is not another transcript scraper

There are eight transcript Actors on this store. All of them hand you the words and stop. The words contain a commercial fact worth more than the text: who is taking money from whom, on what link, with what code.

brilliant.org/veritasium      hensonshaving.com/veritasium   code: veritasium
ground.news/nutshell          saily.com/johnnyharris         code: johnnyharris
ridge.com/MKBHD               80000hours.org/veritasium

Those paths are campaign identifiers. A sponsor hands each creator a URL with the creator's own name in it — which is both the strongest possible proof a deal exists, and the join key that lets you go from one brand to every creator carrying it.

What it does well

• Two independent sources. The description carries the link, the code and the offer. The captions prove it was read out and give the timestamp. Measured across 27 videos: description alone found 22, captions alone 19, together 24.
• It knows what is not a sponsorship. A creator's own merch store, an Amazon affiliate aggregator and a link shortener all sit in the same paragraph and match every cue word. Those are excluded — shop.mkbhd.com is Marques selling shirts, not a brand deal.
• It refuses to bill for a row it cannot name. A read with no attachable link proves something was sold and cannot say by whom. Those are counted in the run summary and never charged.
• Filters run before billing — one brand, tracked links only, or read-aloud only. Filtered rows cost nothing.

Input

{
  "videoUrls": ["@veritasium", "@JohnnyHarris"],
  "maxVideos": 200,
  "trackedLinksOnly": true
}

Mapping one brand instead:

{
  "videoUrls": ["@mkbhd", "@LinusTechTips", "@Kurzgesagt"],
  "brandContains": ["ground.news"],
  "maxVideos": 500
}

Every option

The same wording you see in the Apify console, with the JSON key for API and MCP callers.

Option	What it does	Default
Channels, videos or playlists — videoUrls (required)	@handles, channel URLs, playlist URLs or watch URLs. Channels are expanded into their videos automatically.	—
Max videos — maxVideos	Cap on videos scanned. Each costs two cheap requests and only yields a row if a deal is found.	100
Only these brands — brandContains	Case-insensitive fragments matched against the sponsor's domain. Empty means every brand. Filtered rows are not billed.	—
Tracked campaign links only — trackedLinksOnly	Keep only deals where the sponsor gave the creator a URL with their own name in it.	false
Read aloud only — readAloudOnly	Keep only deals also spoken in the video, so every row carries a timestamp.	false
Caption languages — languages	Priority order for the caption track used to find spoken reads. The description is read regardless.	["en"]
Concurrency — concurrency	Videos processed in parallel.	8
Proxy — proxyConfiguration	Leave the default. Starts on cheap datacenter proxies and escalates only if YouTube throttles.	{"useApifyProxy":true}

Output

One row per brand per video.

{
  "videoId": "wt4p2oalmRY",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt4p2oalmRY",
  "videoTitle": "Is spider web really stronger than steel?",
  "publishedAt": "2026-08-05",
  "viewCount": 5500000,
  "channelName": "Veritasium",
  "channelId": "UCHnyfMqiRRG1u-2MsSQLbXA",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnyfMqiRRG1u-2MsSQLbXA",
  "brand": "hensonshaving.com",
  "brandDomain": "hensonshaving.com",
  "sponsorUrl": "https://hensonshaving.com/veritasium",
  "campaign": "veritasium",
  "trackedLink": true,
  "code": "veritasium",
  "offer": "20% off",
  "source": "description+transcript",
  "readAtSeconds": 964,
  "evidence": "Get a Henson razor at hensonshaving.com/veritasium and use code veritasium…",
  "spokenEvidence": "Thanks to Henson Shaving for sponsoring this video. See, facial hair resists more than you think…",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-20T09:14:02.113Z"
}

Every field

You are billed per sponsorship delivered, so here is everything a row can contain.

The deal

Field	What it is
brand / brandDomain	The sponsor's domain, which is the stable identifier. ground.news is the same advertiser however the read phrases it.
sponsorUrl	The exact URL from the description, including the campaign path.
campaign	The path when it carries the creator's name — veritasium, nutshell, MKBHD. This is the sponsor's own campaign id, and the join key for mapping a brand's roster.
trackedLink	true when that path was found. A cue word can be a coincidence; a third-party domain carrying the creator's handle is a deal.
code	The discount code, when one is stated.
offer	The stated offer — 20% off, $10 off, free trial.

The evidence

Field	What it is
source	description, or description+transcript when the same brand was also spoken.
readAtSeconds	Where the spoken read starts. Absent when the deal appears only in the description — a timestamp pointing at the wrong read is worse than none.
evidence	The description text around the link.
spokenEvidence	The caption text around the read, when there was one.

The video and creator

Field	What it is
videoId / videoUrl / videoTitle	The video the deal was found in.
publishedAt	Upload date, so you can see when a brand started or stopped with a creator.
viewCount	Views at the time of the run — a rough proxy for what the placement was worth.
channelName / channelId / channelUrl	The creator taking the money.
scrapedAt	When this run read the video.

Who this is for

• Influencer agencies building a creator shortlist that already runs deals in a category.
• Brand and growth teams checking which creators a competitor sponsors, how often, and what offer they run.
• Creators and managers benchmarking rate cards against who else a brand is paying.
• Analysts tracking a brand's spend footprint across YouTube over time.

What it does not do

It finds deals that are disclosed — a link in the description, or a read in the audio. It cannot see an undisclosed placement, and it does not estimate what a deal was paid. It will also miss a read in a video with no captions in your chosen languages, unless the description also carries the link.

Detection was measured on 27 videos across five channels while this was built: the description found 22, the captions 19, and the two together 24, with no false positives in that sample. Recall on a larger labelled sample has not been measured — treat an empty result as "nothing disclosed that we could attribute", not as proof of no sponsorship.

Common uses

• Roster mapping — run a brand fragment across 20 creators and see every one carrying it.
• Category shortlist — scan a niche and rank creators by how many distinct brands they run.
• Competitive timeline — publishedAt per deal shows when a brand entered or left a creator.
• Rate benchmarking — brands, offers and view counts side by side.

Pricing

Pay per sponsorship delivered — $8.00 per 1,000. Videos with no deal, rows removed by your filters, and reads that could not be attributed to a brand cost nothing.

Starting a run costs $0.00002 — the platform's $0.00001 minimum, charged once per GB of memory, and these Actors run on 2 GB. That is two thousandths of a cent per run.

Scanning is the expensive part and you are not billed for it: a 500-video channel with forty deals costs forty rows, not five hundred.

Other Actors in this family

Same engines, same billing, no account or API key on any of them.

YouTube & video

• Download YouTube Subtitles in Bulk — SRT, VTT & Text — Bulk subtitles from videos, channels or playlists — text, SRT, VTT or RAG chunks.
• Export YouTube Comments to CSV — Replies and Likes — Every comment and reply thread, with likes, authors and creator flags.
• List Every Video on a YouTube Channel — Export to CSV — A channel's whole back catalogue plus a subscriber and RSS summary row.
• YouTube Search API — Bulk Results, No Quota — Many search terms at once, every result as a row, filtered before you are billed.
• Track Deleted YouTube Videos & Title Changes — What a channel quietly changed: deleted videos, rewritten titles, view velocity.
• YouTube Creator Email Finder & Sponsor Lookup — A channel list into leads: the published email, audience bands, and who already sponsors them.
• Export a YouTube Playlist to CSV — Every Video — Any playlist as a table, with each video position in it.

Search demand

• AnswerThePublic Alternative — Autocomplete Keyword API — One seed into hundreds of real keywords from Google, YouTube and Amazon autocomplete.
• Google Trends API — Today's Trending Searches, No Key — Today's trending searches by country, with traffic bands and the news behind them.

E-commerce

• Export Any Shopify Store's Products to CSV or JSON — Any Shopify catalogue: variants, SKUs, live prices, stock, images, collections.
• New Shopify Product Alerts — Competitor Drop Tracker — Only what a store launched since the last run. Scanning is free.

Hiring

• Greenhouse, Lever & Ashby Job Scraper — No API Key — Paste a company domain, get its open roles from Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever or SmartRecruiters.
• Ghost Job Detector — Track Reposts, Closures & Edits — What changed on a careers page: opened, closed, quietly reposted, or a ghost job.

FAQ

Will I get blocked, or my account banned? There is no account to ban — no login, no cookies. It reads public descriptions and caption tracks, starting on datacenter proxies and escalating only if YouTube throttles. YouTube signals throttling with an HTTP 200 and an error body rather than an error code, which is the trap that silently halves most scrapers' results; this one detects it by reason and rotates.

Is it legal to scrape this? It reads the public description and public caption track that YouTube serves for every video, with no login and nothing bypassed. Sponsorship disclosures are, by design, public statements — the FTC and its equivalents require them to be. YouTube's Terms of Service are a separate contract question, and what you do with a list of creators is governed by marketing and privacy law regardless of where the list came from. Not legal advice.

How accurate is it? See "What it does not do" above — the measured numbers are there rather than a claim of completeness.

Why is brand a domain and not a company name? Because the domain is stable and joinable. A read might say "Henson", "Henson Shaving" or "Henson razors"; the link says hensonshaving.com every time.

How much does 1,000 sponsorships cost? $8.00, plus $0.00002 for the run.

Can I export the results to Excel or Google Sheets? Yes. Every run's dataset downloads as CSV, Excel, JSON, XML or RSS from the Storage tab, or straight from the API if you want a live link a spreadsheet can pull.

Can I connect it to Zapier, Make or n8n? Yes — Apify publishes integrations for all three, plus webhooks that fire when a run finishes.

Do I need to write code? No. Fill the form in the console and press Start. It is also available over MCP so an AI agent can call it directly.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes, via Apify Schedules, webhooks, or the API. Scheduling it on a creator list is how you catch a new brand deal the week it starts.