Welcome to our rundown of the most-watched branded YouTube videos of the week.
We’re publishing this snippet of a larger Gospel Stats Weekly Brand Report in order to analyze sponsorship trends in the creator economy. Any video launched in tandem with an official brand partner is eligible for the ranking.
And – as the name up above would imply – all the data comes from Gospel Stats. If you’re interested in learning more about Gospel – and which brands are sponsoring what creators on YouTube – click here.
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2024 is starting strong for MrBeast. For the entire month of January, he’s held top spot on all our Branded Video Reports, raking in millions of views for himself, his crew, and the variety of sponsors giving him money so he can do stuff like spend seven days in solitary confinement and trap people here and there and everywhere. As we mentioned last week, podcasts are staying popular, too, but there’s also clear viewer hunger for spooky content, with MrBallen featuring last week and Freddy Fazbear’s longtime nemesis Markiplier making an appearance this week.
Check out our top five picks right here:
#1 We Built A Town
Channel: MrBeast
Brand: Dragon City
If you know MrBeast, you know he’s built his channel on philanthropy. Some of his earliest videos were footage of him handing money out to people on the street. And, over the last year or so, he’s consistently gone viral for bigger and bigger philanthropically oriented stunts, like paying for people’s medical procedures and digging 100 wells in Cameroon, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. The latest of these go-big-or-go-home videos features MrBeast and aid workers building long-term housing for a Guatemalan community whose homes are often destroyed by tropical storms. The effort was (appropriately) sponsored by Dragon City, a mobile game where players build and upgrade homes for their fleet of dragons.
#2 Shane Gillis | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #478
Channel: Theo Von
Brand: Celsius, PrizePicks, Current, BetterHelp, Füm
Like we mentioned, podcasts are holding steady in the top fives, which means YouTube’s push to take some traffic from Spotify by urging podcasters to upload video versions of their episodes to its platform…might be paying off. This Past Weekend is comedian Theo Von‘s weekly podcast, and this week he brought back fellow comedian Shane Gillis to talk about “moving to Austin, the perils of hot air balloon rides, shady tunnel activity in NYC, the upside to arranged marriages, and defensive vomiting.” As is common with ‘casts, the episode has several sponsors, but the one we want to point out is PrizePicks, which sponsored a whopping 49 videos this week. We’re guessing that has something to do with the fantasy sports surging in the leadup to Super Bowl LVIII.
#3 Do People Understand the Scale of the Universe?
Channel: Veritasium
Brand: Ground News
Veritasium is back out on the streets, seeing just how much the average person doesn’t know about our universe and what’s in it. He flagged down passersby and asked them to rank things like “universe,” “planet,” “moon,” “galaxy,” and “star” from smallest to largest. Spoiler: a lot of people had trouble. His cosmic adventure was sponsored by Ground News, which collates breaking news from around the world and says it lets readers “compare headlines across the political spectrum using media bias ratings driven by data.” It also sponsored two other videos this week: #57, where YouTuber Triggernometry interviewed people at a pro-Palestine protest, and #112 from Some More News, who suggests Democrats: Maybe Hold A Primary Perhaps Possibly?
#4 I Tested 1-Star VS 5-Star Theme Parks
Channel: FaZe Rug
Brand: Underdog Fantasy
Our #4 video of the week follows FaZe Rug as he risks it all to find out whether one-star theme parks are really one-star or if we should just cut them a little slack. His 22-minute video follows him to parks around the globe for good times, bad times, and ? times. Like Theo Von, he’s sponsored by a fantasy sports company–this time Underdog Fantasy, which also sponsored three other videos (#262, #444, and #499). We expect to see more and more fantasy sponsorships over the next two weeks as bettors lay in their teams for the Bowl.
BONUS: #8 Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted 2 – Part 10
Channel: Markiplier
Brand: Honkai: Star Rail
Our bonus video usually comes from a bit farther down our list of top branded videos, but considering the reignited fervor surrounding Five Nights at Freddy‘s has brought the king of Five Nights himself, Markiplier, back to playing the series, we couldn’t resist spotlighting this one. Markiplier was one of the creators who championed the very first Five Nights game and helped propel it to YouTube stardom. His dedication to mastering the franchise’s mechanics is so significant (and just a tad obsessive) that he very nearly had a cameo in the recent Five Nights movie as a security guard who bites it in the first few minutes. His foray back into Scott Cawthon‘s kaleidoscope of kid-consuming nightmares is sponsored by another video game: Honkai: Star Rail, from Genshin Impact developer miHoYo.
…and there’s a lot more data where that came from. If you’re interested in learning more about Gospel – and which brands are sponsoring what creators on YouTube – click here.
