Seven coffee brands, and the one spending deepest on the fewest doors

The shallowest shelf we have mapped

Seven coffee and tea brands average 2.6 deals per creator, and the deepest programme in the category belongs to a brand that is not one of the seven.

We measured the 7 brands competing for the same creator slot: Pique, Trade Coffee, Cometeer, Javy, Nami Matcha, Lifeboost and Super Coffee. 407 sponsored creators and 1,054 sponsored videos since June 2021.

Every shelf we have mapped has a brand that goes back. Supplements has LMNT at 6.3 bookings each, hydration has HydroJug at 7.1, gut health has BIOptimizers at 5.9. Coffee has nobody above 2.7. The category buys introductions and then stops.

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals across the seven brands, pulled 19 August 2026.

Which of these brands actually pays creators

Two brands are most of the shelf, and neither of them books anybody often.

Not one of these seven brands books its creators three times on average, and the two that hold 79 percent of the shelf between them both sit under 2.7.

Two brands clear the bar a pyramid chart needs, which is 100 creators and 2.2 average bookings together. Cometeer misses on both halves at 84 creators and 1.5 bookings, and the rest are too small to draw. Lifeboost rebooks 83 percent of its people, the best rate here, on a list of six. Against every other category we track this year, coffee is at the thin end, which is visible in the brands paying YouTube creators most in 2026.

What each one took

The two big buyers picked different audiences and treated both the same way, and the interesting programme is the one outside the list.

Cometeer bought a lot of first dates

Cometeer took technology and business, at eight and four times the average. But 84 creators at 1.5 bookings each and 29% ever booked twice, which is a lot of first dates and no second ones.

Technology took 10 deals at 7.6 times the shelf average and business took 12 at 4.4 times, off a base of 126 deals whose biggest block is food at 57. Not one of its 84 creators has been booked ten or more times, and 60 of them were booked exactly once. The category picks were sharp and nothing was built on them.

The one that goes back

Black Rifle Coffee is not one of the seven brands above, and it has the programme the seven do not. 26 creators, 154 videos, 5.9 bookings each, the highest repeat rate here and higher than Pique or Trade Coffee. It is not underspending. It is spending narrowly: sports, entertainment, media and outdoors, and little else.

Twenty six doors, knocked on nearly six times each. That is a third of Cometeer's list carrying more than four times its depth. Whether the ceiling on that is the audience or the ambition is not something our data can answer, but the ratio is the one every other brand on this shelf should want.

Javy, Nami Matcha, Lifeboost and Super Coffee are preferences rather than programmes. Javy went to beauty at 9.2 times the shelf average and education at 5.9 times, on 21 creators. Nami Matcha has seven creators and started in May 2025. Lifeboost has six and rebooks five of them. Super Coffee has three creators, three videos, and has not been recorded buying since October 2022.

How much do these rosters overlap

Hardly at all, and the few names the category shares are cooking channels.

Stack those 7 rosters and they hardly touch. 384 of the 407 creators were paid by exactly one brand. Only 2 were paid by three.

The names the category does keep going back to are food channels, not coffee channels. Adam Ragusea has taken 31 deals here, Internet Shaquille 18, Brian Lagerstrom 9.

Six of the eight most shared names on this shelf are food channels. That is the category quietly agreeing on something: a person teaching you how to make a thing sells the thing better than a person reviewing it.

Adam Ragusea has taken 31 recorded deals from this category, which is more than five of the seven brands have placed in total.

Two brands have between them worked out who converts here, and both of them stopped at two or three bookings a head anyway.

That is the gap worth naming. Trade Coffee found Adam Ragusea and went back thirty one times between two brands, and then the same brand booked 66 other people exactly once. Working out which of a roster's names deserve the eleventh booking, rather than which deserve the first, is the part most programmes never get to, and it is most of what we do once a client's first flight has run. It is also the cheapest thing on this list, because the names are already yours.

Which pockets are worn out, and which are empty

Health is the one worn room, and the honest answer on empty rooms is that the test returns nothing.

Health is the worst, and every single brand here is in it. All 7. 60 creators carry 226 videos, 3.8 each.

Food is next. 62 creators, 212 videos, 6 of the 7 brands, 20% of every deal here.

Every measured brand sitting in one pocket is the strongest crowding signal this data produces. It happens on other shelves too, on lifestyle across the 13 supplement brands and on health across the 15 sleep brands, and what makes it bite here is that health is also the room where this shelf goes back most often, at 3.8 deals a head against a shelf average of 2.6.

Now the other end.

Lifestyle, 107 creators at 1.8 videos each. The biggest pocket on the shelf and the cheapest, because nobody went back for seconds. Education, 20 creators, four brands. Media, 11 creators, three brands.

Lifestyle is the odd one, appearing on both tables. Five of the seven brands have bought there and it still runs at the lowest repeat rate on the shelf, which is a different thing from an empty room. Plenty of people have tried it and almost nobody found a reason to return.

What the numbers do not show

Every count here is a floor, it is one platform only, and the formal empty pocket test found nothing on this shelf.

These are recorded paid YouTube deals. Instagram, TikTok and podcast placements bought elsewhere are not in this pull. A zero means we have not recorded a deal, which is not the same as a brand never buying one, and on a category this small that gap matters.

The under sponsored test returned no category at all here. The three named above are quiet corners read off the crowding table, not pockets that passed the threshold, and the honest reason is that the whole shelf is too small for the test to find a lane with 20 or more creators and few enough buyers. Treat them as somewhere to look.

Lifestyle's low repeat rate has two possible causes and our data cannot separate them. Either those creators sold badly, or five brands each ran one flight and never built a second. The second is the pattern the rest of this shelf shows.

Category labels come from what a channel mostly makes, so a food channel that also covers health counts once.

A number this specific is only worth something if you also know what it cannot see.

What to do about it

The opportunity on this shelf is depth, because everybody else bought width.

1. Do not open with health creators. Every rival is already there, those people have run a coffee ad four times, and it is the one lane where your audience gives you no advantage at all.

Health is the only pocket on this shelf with all seven brands inside it, at 3.8 deals per creator against 1.8 in lifestyle.

2. Keep buying the way you buy, and point it at more doors. 5.9 videos per creator is the best number on this shelf and you should not trade it for reach. Cometeer is the warning: 84 creators, 1.5 videos each. You have three times its repeat rate on a third of its list.

Cometeer holds 12.0 percent of the shelf and has never booked a single creator ten times. Pique holds 47.5 percent and left 103 of its 186 people after one video. Width has been tried here by everybody, and it is the thing that has not worked.

3. The cheap lanes are lifestyle, entertainment, education and media. Wider still: across the six ready-to-drink brands we measured, 349 of the 395 creators belong to Huel. The powder gets the creator money. The can gets almost none.

Two to call: MelBeezeeTV and JDfromNY206. Neither has taken money from this shelf.

That last comparison with the powder shelf is worth reading properly, because the same creators sell both and the money is not split evenly, which is set out in thirteen supplement brands and the niches nobody sponsors.

That last step is the work we do. We pull the rival history on every name, work out which of them earned a second booking and which only earned a first, price the pocket nobody is bidding in, and write the briefs so the claims stay on the right side of the line. Tell us which shelf you are on and we will show you your own version of the picture above.

Keep reading

• The bigger picture. The brands paying YouTube creators most in 2026
• What brands do once the flight has run. Influencer events, and what 45 brands built around them
• Before you brief anyone on a health claim. What the rules ask of you and of them