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. You can also download our YouTube 2025 Sponsorship Landscape Report here.
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In his most recent letter to creators, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said Shorts now average a whopping 200+ billion views per day. And, as we’ve been tracking for over a year now in our Gospel Stats Weekly Brand Reports, Shorts are popular with more than just viewers. Brands dig them, too.
That’s especially clear this week, when–aside from Veritasium at spot #2–we have a full lineup of sponsored Shorts, brought to the internet by brands like Best Buy and platforms like Meta.
Check ’em all out right here:
#1 Would You Skydive for $100?
Channel: MrBeast 2
Brand: Feastables
Views: 29,531,887
Is it just me, or is MrBeast getting a little cheap?
A hundred bucks to jump out of a plane…while drinking chocolate milk from sponsor Feastables. That’s a far cry from the thousands and even millions Jimmy Beast normally forks out.
But we see the strategy here. In one 44-second Short, Team Beast sewed together two trendy video conceits: One where a creator walks up to people in public–usually somewhere in the vicinity of a college–and offers them a crisp Benjamin if they’ll do X task or go on Y adventure; and another where people do absolutely unhinged sh*t on camera. (The latter is the hallmark of Red Bull, which has built an audience of nearly 30 million subscribers by handing its athlete partners production support to film whatever insane stunts they want.)
Hats off to the dudes who took $100 to do that death-defying hurtle. Y’all scored 30 million views for YouTube’s biggest creator.
#2 The Ridiculous Engineering Of The World’s Most Important Machine
Channel: Veritasium
Brand: Brilliant
Views: 16,412,518
Here’s something cool about this video: It’s Veritasium‘s top-performing upload of all time. We wrote about that earlier this month, when Derek Muller (Veritasium’s creator and core host) revealed that he’s slowly brought on a sprawling production team and plans to spend a little more time off camera.
That team–which Muller hired with the help of investor Electrify Video Partners–was behind this video, a chronicle of “the most complicated commercial product humanity’s ever built.” That product? A photolithography system from Dutch company ASML that allows for major advancements in microchips, the cornerstones of modern technology and engineering.
In his work/life balance announcement, Muller described how Veritasium started nearly a decade ago with just him. He produced classroom-style videos that were thorough, but didn’t have a lot of field trips. Now, his content looks like the above video, where the Veritasium team takes viewers inside ASML and conducts full-scale experiments to show how the science principles they’re teaching make a difference in real life.
The jump in production quality has paid off: Within seven days of upload, this video reached 11.3 million views. Now it’s up over 16 million, which is sure to please Muller’s longtime sponsor Brilliant.
#3 Impossible Golf Flop Shot
Channel: Dude Perfect
Brand: Best Buy
Views: 5,121,361
Nerds vs jocks is so 2003. Now it’s nerds and jocks.
Best Buy and Dude Perfect‘s collab has been popping up in my Shorts feed at least once a day. It’s a high-octane, high-volume competition that involves one of the biggest sports on YouTube: golf.
These two might seem an unlikely couple if you think of Best Buy as the place you go to get a new TV or gamer keyboard, but Best Buy produces a lot of golf-related tech, from cheaper bits like GPS devices and Bluetooth speakers to pricey full-scale simulators. And its partnership with Dude Perfect goes way beyond this video: It’s a major sponsor of primetime golf league TGL, where the Dudes will have a starring role in Season 2 and will get their own Dude Perfect-branded golf club for sale through Best Buy.
This is the only video Best Buy sponsored this week, but it says to “[k]eep an eye on Dude Perfect’s YouTube channel for in-stadium shenanigans and challenges throughout the new season,” so we suspect it won’t be the last.
#4 The Block That Changed Christmas #blockblast #hungrystudio
Channel: Rennrat
Brand: Block Blast
Views: 5,031,435
If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s mobile games advertising on YouTube. There are dozens of titles sponsoring videos each week, from the classic Raid: Shadow Legends to Honkai: Star Rail.
What’s intriguing about Block Blast‘s approach is that instead of getting creators to do a similar style plug in their videos, it got creator partners to do what they do best while name-dropping it. What do we mean? Well, video #4 this week is from animator Rennrat, whose sponcon is a 33-second cartoon Short with a dramatic story about a kid whose dad banned phones over the holidays (meaning, gasp, no Block Blast). That fits right in with Rennrat’s usual comedic animated content.
A little later, in spot #15, Block Blast sponsored Auntie Charli for a skit about personalities clashing over the holidays. Just like Rennrat’s video, Charli’s is close to the rest of her content, so regular viewers are enticed to stick around, and new viewers could be enticed by the creators’ voices coming through.
And the numbers don’t lie: Rennrat’s video picked up 5 million views, and Charli’s nabbed 3 million. Not bad, Block Blast.
BONUS #5 Dice Decide My Snack Mix 8 #RayBanMetaPartner #RBMCP #ad
Channel: ARTYTIME
Brand: Ray-Ban Meta AI
Views: 4,952,929
Normally we dive further down our list for a bonus video, but this week’s #5 upload stuck out to us. Meta is executing major cuts to its metaverse division and going whole hog on AI, which includes its partnership with Ray-Ban to produce smart glasses. Will that pay off? Who knows. Meta has been zigging and zagging at Mark Zuckerberg‘s whim for years, chasing every web3 trend that inevitably fizzles.
But wearables might actually stick around, and by tapping foodie creator ARTYTIME, Meta is reaching out to creators beyond the tech sphere, trying to show the everyday applications of its latest product. It’s an interesting strategy, since we normally see new tech go to creators like MKBHD. This video shows Meta wants its glasses to go everywhere–and it’s scooped up 5 million views for its efforts.
…and there’s a lot more data where that came from. If you like our Weekly Top 5, you’ll love everything else Gospel has to offer. Start with our newly released YouTube 2025 Sponsorship Landscape Report, which you can download right here.
