Which Influencers Should a Supplement Brand Sponsor Next

The short version

Of 1,832 creators who fit the five kinds of person a supplement brand gets told to hire, only 253 have ever been paid by a rival supplement brand.

That leaves 1,539 who have never been sold a greens powder by anybody, and 40 who have been sold by four or more brands at once. The crowded end of this shelf, the part everyone complains about bidding on, is about 2 percent of it.

We found this while doing something small. A strategy report came back on IM8, the supplement brand David Beckham co-founded, and it was a good report. It named five places where the brand could buy attention cheaply, it explained why each one was cheap, and it laid out a ninety day pilot with thirty six creators in it, split eight credentialed educators, sixteen routine creators, eight from performance communities, and four podcast hosts.

It did not name a single person.

Who says so: our own record of paid YouTube sponsorships, 757,646 deals, pulled on 19 August 2026.

What does a strategy report leave you holding

A shopping list, and all of the work.

"Recruit eight to twelve dietitians, sports dietitians, physiotherapists and strength coaches" is a sound instruction. It is also the easy half. Somebody still has to find those twelve people, check whether a competitor is already paying them, check whether their audience still turns up, and find a way to reach them.

The description is the cheap part, and the names are the expensive part.

So we ran the second half. We took each of the five descriptions, turned it into a search of our own record of who pays creators, removed the 19 creators IM8 already books, and sorted everyone who was left by whether the category had been sold to them before.

Who is already on the list

Nineteen creators, and they all lean the same way.

We wrote up what IM8 spends on creators last week, so the short version here is that the brand has 19 creators and a clear taste, longer form and science leaning, with Ben Greenfield, Mark Manson, Simon Hill and Dr James DiNicolantonio among them.

Those 19 came out of every search below before it was sorted, because the point of the exercise is who is missing. A taste that consistent is a strength for the first twenty creators and a ceiling on the next hundred, and the five lanes below are all places the current nineteen do not reach.

Where is the shelf crowded, and where is it empty

Everywhere except the places brands actually look.

We searched eighteen rival supplement and greens brands, including AG1, LMNT, Ritual, Huel, Seed, Momentous, Ka'Chava, Bloom, Armra, Thorne, Onnit and Liquid IV, and found the 2,580 creators those brands have paid. Then we checked every creator who matched one of the five descriptions against that list.

Creatine is the emptiest lane on the shelf, with 63 creators who fit and 5 who have ever taken supplement money.

Not one of the 63 has been paid by four or more brands. For a category that every supplement brand is launching into this year, that is a strange thing to find, and it says the launches are all chasing the same handful of names.

The parent lane is the opposite. Of 576 creators who fit, 82 have already been paid and 16 are in the crowded group, which is the highest share on the table. Parents get pitched constantly.

If you are working out where your next pound goes, this table is the answer on its own. Comparing it against the whole supplement shelf is worth ten minutes, because the same shape shows up there, a small crowded top and a long ignored tail.

So who are the actual people

Fifty four of them, and the interesting ones are not the biggest.

Some names, to show what the three groups look like in practice.

Midlife Stockman has 1.04 million subscribers, and 564,188 people watch an average video, which is more than half the list. He writes for midlife men. LMNT and AG1 both already pay him, so the audience is proven twice over, and no greens brand owns him.

Alan Thrall runs Untamed Strength and has 850,000 subscribers of barbell coaching, and not one supplement deal anywhere in our record. That is the largest untouched strength audience we found, sitting in the emptiest lane on the table above.

Cracked Pickleball has 52,900 subscribers and 77,481 views on an average video, so the audience is half again bigger than the list. Momentous and Huel have both bought there. Racquet sports are the kind of community a supplement brand reaches by sponsoring the game rather than the athlete.

Jessica Valant is a licensed physical therapist with 25 years of practice and 1.11 million subscribers. She can say the things about quality and evidence that a lifestyle creator is not allowed to say, which is the whole point of hiring a credentialed person.

And one to avoid. Andy Galpin is the best qualified performance scientist on the list, and AG1, Momentous and LMNT all pay him already. He is proof the strategy works, and he is also the most expensive way to act on it.

What these numbers do not show

This is one platform. Everything above is YouTube, because that is where our record of who paid whom is strongest, so a creator showing zero supplement deals may well have done three on Instagram that we cannot see. Read every zero as "nothing on YouTube" rather than as "never sponsored".

It is a floor, not a total. We count deals we have found, so a brand's true roster is always at least what we show and sometimes more.

The persona search is keyword based, and it misses people. Matching on what a creator says about themselves finds the ones who describe themselves plainly and skips the ones who do not, so 1,832 is the number we can prove, not the number that exists.

And a subscriber count lies more often than it tells the truth. One registered dietitian in this search has 810,000 subscribers and 4,125 views on an average video. We set a floor at 2 percent of the list still watching, which removed several names a brand would otherwise have paid list-size prices for.

Working out which of those zeroes is an opening and which is a warning is the slow part, and it is the part we do for brands, one creator at a time, before anybody sends an email.

What to do with this on Monday

Take the list of creators you are considering, and put each one in a column. Column one, nobody in your category has paid them. Column two, one to three of your competitors have. Column three, four or more have.

Then spend most of the budget on column two, test column one in volume because it is cheap, and walk past column three unless you have a reason that survives being said out loud.

If you want the version of this done against your own shelf, with the names filled in and the competitors checked, that is the thing we build, and it takes about a week.

Keep reading. Up to the brands that sponsor most on YouTube. Across to what IM8 spends on creators, the supplement shelf and the niches nobody sponsors, and how LMNT built its creator programme. And before you sign anybody in this category, the FTC rules for supplement claims.