Three Gaming Brands Own 83% of Energy Drink Creator Deals

The single biggest buyer of creator sponsorships in drinks makes gaming powder

Gamer Supps has 2,825 recorded paid videos across 269 creators, which is more than any other drink brand in our census of 143 companies.

LMNT is second on 2,430 and AG1 is third on 2,417. Both of those get written about constantly. Gamer Supps sells tubs of flavoured caffeine powder to people who play video games, and it has never appeared in a functional beverage trade report we have read.

Who says so: our own database of recorded paid YouTube sponsorships, matched to the 143-company beverage census by website domain, covering 30 October 2020 to 7 August 2026.

Energy is the biggest shelf, and three brands hold nearly all of it

The census splits into eleven shelves. Energy is the largest one by recorded deals, and it is far more concentrated than it looks.

Inside that 4,776, Gamer Supps has 2,825, G Fuel has 960 and DUBBY Energy has 193. That is 3,978 of 4,776, or 83 percent of the shelf, held by three gaming brands.

The other thirteen energy companies with anything on record, a group that includes Red Bull, Monster, Celsius and Alani Nu, share the remaining 798 between them.

Who says so: our own deal database crossed against the 143-company census. Read it as a ranking of trackable buying, not of total spend, for the reason in the last section.

The last six months are not close

We compared the six months to April 2026 against the six before it. The window stops in April on purpose, because our scan lags real uploads and the most recent months always look thin.

Gamer Supps booked more paid videos in those six months than AG1 and G Fuel managed together. DUBBY Energy went from six to a hundred and twenty seven, which is a brand switching a channel on rather than growing one.

Who says so: the same database, counted on upload date. Deals with no upload date are excluded from both windows, which is why the window totals do not add to the all-time totals.

Their creators are filed under gaming, and that is why you miss them

Here is the part that explains the blind spot. We looked at what kind of channel each deal sat on, splitting the three gaming brands from everybody else in the set.

The two groups barely touch. If you are searching for beverage creators by looking at health, lifestyle and food channels, which is what almost every brief we get asks for, you will never see the 3,500 gaming and entertainment placements sitting right next to you.

It also means the talent is cheaper than the wellness lane, because you are not bidding against the greens powders for the same people.

This is the point where most brands ask us to just hand them a list, and that is fair, but the list is the easy half. The hard half is knowing which of those channels has already run a competitor's code in the last ninety days, what they charged for it, and whether the audience is in a country where you can actually ship. That is the work we do before a single email goes out.

The relationships underneath are deep, not wide

The gaming brands do not spread thin. Loot Goblin Marketplace has taken 85 separate Gamer Supps deals, BigfryTV has taken 48, and JEV has taken 49 from G Fuel.

Those are not campaigns, they are salaries paid in placements. A creator who has read your code 85 times is not going to be flipped by a competitor with a better one-off rate, which is worth knowing before you try.

The wider pattern behind that, and which brands rebook instead of rotating, is in our post on which wellness drink brands rebook their creators.

Who says so: our own database, counting deals per creator per brand across the full window.

Two brands just switched the channel off

Magic Mind fell from 113 recorded videos to 32, a drop of 72 percent. 5-hour Energy went from 40 to zero.

Both had been steady sponsor-read buyers, so this is a change in behaviour rather than a brand that never bought. It reads as a budget cut, an agency change, or a decision that the channel stopped working, and every one of those is a reason to pick up the phone rather than a reason to write the brand off.

Who says so: our own database. We have no inside knowledge of either company's plans, and this is an observation about their recorded output, not a statement about their finances.

What this number is not

Our deals are read out of YouTube video descriptions. That means a brand shipping powder with a promo code is almost fully visible to us, and a brand selling cans through a shop is nearly invisible.

Gatorade shows six recorded deals and Powerade shows zero. Gatorade obviously outspends Gamer Supps many times over, it just spends the money on athletes, teams and television, where nothing lands in a description for us to count.

We also hold no TikTok or Instagram sponsorship data at all. So the honest reading of this post is that gaming brands dominate the measurable long-form lane in drinks, not that they dominate all beverage marketing.

Why a can is so much harder to attribute than a powder is the whole subject of our post on retail attribution for creator campaigns.

What we would actually do with this

Three things, in order.

Start with the entertainment and gaming channels the wellness brands are not bidding on, because the same audience drinks the same caffeine and the price has not been bid up yet.

Attach a code to every single placement, so the second buy is a decision instead of a guess.

Then keep the claims inside what the label supports, because caffeine, focus and energy copy is one of the more heavily policed corners of advertising, and a creator improvising a health promise on your behalf is the most expensive sentence in the campaign. The rules that apply are set out in our FTC playbook for 2026.

We find these creators, we check what they have already run and what they charged, we negotiate, and we set the tracking up so you can tell the difference between a placement that sold something and one that just got views. If you sell a drink and you want to know which of these channels is open this quarter, that is the conversation to have.