What Three Functional Powder Brands Paid 402 Creators For

A shelf with three brands standing on it

Ghost Lifestyle has paid 26 creators. That is the whole roster, and those 26 people have made 305 sponsored videos between them, which is 21.4 percent of every paid video on this shelf. Beam needed 251 creators to reach 697.

That gap is the story of functional powders and hydration, and you can only see it because the shelf is small enough to count all the way through.

We pulled every recorded paid YouTube deal for the three brands with enough activity to measure, Beam, Liquid I.V. and Ghost Lifestyle. That comes to 402 creators and 1,424 videos, from 16 July 2021 through 11 July 2026. Three brands is the thinnest shelf in this series, and that thinness is what the category looks like rather than a gap in our counting.

The other number worth holding onto before we go brand by brand is the overlap. Of the 402 creators, 396 have only ever been paid by one of the three. Six have been paid by two. Not one has been paid by all three.

So this works as three companies shopping in three separate rooms, rather than an auction where everybody bids on the same names. That is very different from the wellness drink shelf, where most of the companies have never bought a creator video at all.

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals, pulled 12 August 2026, affiliate only attribution rows excluded.

What each brand actually bought

The three of them sell a similar shape of product, a powder you stir into water, and they have bought creators in three ways that barely resemble each other.

Ghost Lifestyle, which does not get a chart

Ghost has 26 creators, under the 100 a pyramid chart needs to fill, so drawing one would give you a picture that is mostly empty canvas pretending to be a finding. Here are the numbers instead.

Ghost Lifestyle has 26 creators on record and 305 paid videos from them, which is 21.4 percent of every video on this shelf.

88 percent of those 26 came back for another video, and the average creator has been booked 11.7 times. Ten of the 26 have passed ten videos each.

Its mix is lifestyle at 115 deals and health at 107, so more than a third of everything Ghost runs goes to health channels, at 2.9 times the shelf rate. Gaming is 31 deals, 4.4 times the rate, the sharpest lean on the whole shelf. Fitness is 21 deals at 3.3 times.

Now put the three side by side. Beam has 12 creators past ten videos, Liquid I.V. has 10, Ghost has 10. All three ended up leaning on about a dozen people. Two of them paid to meet a few hundred strangers on the way there.

The two categories this shelf has worn out

Only two categories qualify as worked over, and both have all three brands buying in them.

Lifestyle is the big one, 101 creators and 387 deals, 27.2 percent of everything on the shelf, at 3.8 videos each. Entertainment is close behind at 85 creators and 293 deals, though it is spread thin enough at 3.4 videos each that it is not yet exhausted.

Health is the one to be careful with. It is 12.2 percent of the shelf, but it only involves 26 creators, and those 26 have made 174 videos. That works out at 6.7 videos per person, almost twice what lifestyle asks of its creators. A health channel on this shelf has read a powder script six or seven times already.

That is where the price problem starts. When 26 people carry a whole category and three brands already know all of them, you are buying the seventh mention rather than a fresh audience. Checking that before you send the first email is genuinely tedious work, going through two years of video descriptions for competitor codes and expired exclusivity, and it is a lot of what we do for brands entering a shelf like this. It also keeps disclosure clean, because a channel running a competing supplement code in the same month is a problem you want to find before your legal team does.

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals across all three brands, pulled 12 August 2026, categories assigned by our own channel classifier.

Where nobody is buying, and why that list came back empty

On most shelves we can point at a category holding plenty of creators and very few deals, and call it an opening. On this one the list is empty, and it is worth saying that plainly instead of inventing a gap.

Below the top four categories there is almost nothing to measure. Fitness has 3 creators carrying 30 videos, which is 10.0 videos each, the highest concentration on the board. Gaming has 4 creators carrying 33. Politics has 8 creators carrying 40, with two of the three brands in it. Each of those is a couple of standing relationships somebody already built, rather than an empty room waiting for you.

The nearest thing to a genuine opening is sports, 10 creators and 28 videos at 2.8 each, with all three brands present and none of them deep. Media has 22 creators and 84 videos with only two brands buying. Fashion has 6 creators and 27 videos, again with two brands.

An empty gap list on a three brand shelf does not mean the space is full. It means almost nothing has been tried, so there is no evidence either way. That is a better position than it sounds, and it looks a lot like the gut health drink aisle, where 21 brands have produced 93 sponsored videos in total. Thin categories are cheap to enter and expensive to guess at.

The six creators two brands have already shared

This is the complete list. Every other creator on the shelf belongs to exactly one of the three.

Six names is short enough to read every channel yourself in an afternoon, and you should, because they are the only proof here that a creator can carry two powder brands at once.

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals, pulled 12 August 2026, counting distinct brands per creator.

What to do if you are the fourth brand

Copy the depth, skip the width. Ghost got 10 heavy creators out of 26 people, Beam got 12 out of 251. Booking 20 people four times each will teach you more, and cost less, than booking 80 people once.

Do not open in health. It is the most worked category here, all three brands are in it, and the 26 creators who own it have been through this pitch repeatedly. Lifestyle is the same problem at a larger size.

Take the exclusivity conversation seriously while it is still cheap. Six shared creators on a shelf of 402 means the norm here is that a creator picks one powder brand and stays. That norm is worth protecting when you are the one arriving late.

Budget the first year as a test. Outside the top four categories nothing here has been proven either way, so the honest plan is a small spread of experiments with a clear read on each, then depth behind whatever answers.

If it helps to see how this shelf compares to the categories with serious money behind them, the ten brands that account for the most creator sponsorships on YouTube are a useful yardstick for what a mature programme looks like.

And if you would rather not spend that first year learning it the slow way, that is the job we take on. We find the creators, check who has already paid them, handle the negotiating and the paperwork so the same person is not quoted two different numbers by two different people, and keep the disclosures clean while it runs. If you sell a powder and you are looking at a shelf with three names on it and wondering where you fit, come and talk it through with us.