How Many Creators Does a Supplement Brand Actually Pay
The number is much smaller than the category talks like it is, and knowing the real distribution tells you what it costs to be visible.
Senior Partnerships Manager · August 27, 2026 · 5 min read
If you sit in a supplement marketing meeting you would think everyone is running hundreds of creators, because that is the number people say out loud. We counted the whole shelf instead, and the answer is much smaller.
Across 252 confirmed supplement brands we hold 15,255 recorded sponsored videos. The median brand has eight. Seventy nine of the 252 have none at all, and another 53 sit somewhere between one and nine.
So more than half the shelf is either invisible or has done fewer than ten sponsored videos in the whole time we have been recording.
What does the shelf actually look like
Not like a market, more like a small group of brands and a long tail that has barely started.
| Where a brand sits | Brands | What that means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| No recorded sponsored videos | 79 | Nobody is being paid to talk about it on YouTube |
| One to nine videos | 53 | Testing, or one campaign that never repeated |
| Ten to ninety nine videos | 80 | A running program with somebody managing it |
| One hundred or more | 40 | A committed channel, usually with affiliate underneath |
Ten brands hold 37.4% of every sponsored video on the shelf. Twenty five brands hold 62.9%.
That concentration is the number worth taking into your own planning, because it means the bar for being one of the visible brands in supplements is far lower than the noise suggests.
Who is at the top
| Brand | Recorded sponsored videos |
|---|---|
| Ritual | 1,553 |
| Seed | 781 |
| Beam | 625 |
| Gorilla Mind | 478 |
| Pique Life | 453 |
Every one of those five is independent, and none of them got there with a single large campaign. They got there by running the same program every month for years, which is a different kind of budget from the one most brands approve.
What does this mean for your own plan
Three things follow, and they are more useful than a benchmark.
Ten videos is a test, not a program. More than half the shelf never got past that, so if your plan is ten creators and a review, you are planning to join the invisible half.
A hundred is the line where you become one of the forty. That is not a hundred at once, it is a running rate, and most brands at that level are re-booking the same people rather than finding new ones every month.
Your competitor's number is knowable before you commit. This is the thing brands skip, they pick a budget and then discover the category, when the honest sequence is the other way around. If you want that count for your own shelf before you write the plan, that is the first thing we pull for a brand, and it takes a day.
Why so many brands sit at zero
Usually not strategy. A creator program needs somebody to own it every week, it does not survive a marketing team of two people with a retail launch on, and it is the first thing paused when the quarter looks tight.
The other reason is the category itself. Supplements carry claims risk, so a legal team that has not been given approved language will slow a program until it stops, and then the zero looks like a decision when it was a bottleneck. Getting that language written once is most of the work, and it is the part we tend to do before anybody is booked.
What these numbers do not show
They count sponsored videos on YouTube, matched to each brand's own domain, so they are a floor rather than a total. A brand running mostly on Instagram or TikTok will read lower here than it is.
They do not count money. One video from a famous creator and one from a small one look identical in this table, so a brand with fifteen expensive videos may be spending more than a brand with three hundred cheap ones.
They do not say anything worked. A brand at the top of this list is buying a lot of attention, it is not proof the attention sold anything.
And a brand that runs its links through an affiliate tracking domain we have not mapped to it will show a lower count than it should, which is a coverage hole on our side and not a fact about the brand.
Up: the supplement shelf and where the sponsorship gaps are
Across: what happens to a creator program when a big company buys the brand
Risk: affiliate deals against paid deals, and which one you are actually buying