How much does a YouTube video cost in 2026?

Published marketplace benchmarks put a nano YouTube video at $200 – $1,000 and a micro one at $1,000 – $10,000. Those are vendor-compiled ranges from self-reported deals rather than a measured market price, and the same creator will quote differently depending on usage rights, exclusivity, and how many assets are in the deal.

Are these numbers Hive's own data?

No, and that distinction matters. Every figure on this page is a published third-party benchmark — Later, Shopify, impact.com, HypeAuditor, SociaVault, Socialinsider — reproduced with its source and its confidence level. Hive uses these tables to calibrate its matching engine. It has not measured any of them itself, and does not publish figures from its own marketplace here.

Which of these figures should I trust least?

The campaign-return table. It is vendor-sourced from a single dataset and is flagged lower-confidence in the file it comes from. Engagement medians are the strongest figures here — they come from the largest samples with stated formulas. The price bands sit in between: real published ranges, but wide, and compiled from self-reported deals.

Why is YouTube engagement measured against views instead of subscribers?

Because subscriber-based rates are misleading on YouTube. Subscriber lists accumulate dormant accounts, and on most channels the majority of views come from recommendations and search rather than from subscribers. Dividing by views measures the audience that actually showed up.

Are these prices for a whole video or a mention?

The published bands do not say, which is the tables' main limitation on this platform. A dedicated video sits near the top of a band and an in-video integration near the bottom. Always establish which one a quote refers to before comparing it to any benchmark.

Creator pricing benchmarks

What YouTube creators charge, by follower tier

YouTube is the most expensive of the three platforms at every tier, and the reason is structural rather than commercial: a sponsored video is a production, it is searchable years later, and its audience chose to watch for several minutes. The bands below start where Instagram's micro tier starts. These are the benchmark tables Hive's matching engine is calibrated against, printed with their sources.

YouTube sponsored videos: published rate bands

Note where this table starts. YouTube's nano floor is above Instagram's nano ceiling, and its micro band overlaps Instagram's mid band. A YouTube deal is a production commitment: scripting, filming, editing, and a permanent asset. The high column typically means a dedicated video rather than an integration inside someone else's video, and that distinction moves the price more than a subscriber count does.

Sponsored video rates by tier, USD
Tier	Followers	Marketplace rate	Agency rate card band
Nano	under 10,000	$200 – $1,000	$2,000 – $10,000
Micro	10,000 – 99,999	$1,000 – $10,000	$10,000 – $100,000
Mid	100,000 – 499,999	$9,000 – $25,000	$90,000 – $250,000
Macro	500,000 – 999,999	$10,000 – $50,000	$100,000 – $500,000
Mega	1,000,000+	$20,000 – $50,000	$200,000 – $500,000

Marketplace column: Later (2026) and Shopify (2026), citing On Digitals, inBeat and impact.com. These are published vendor benchmark ranges compiled from self-reported deals, not a measurement Hive or anyone else took of the whole market — treat them as an anchor for a negotiation, not a price list. Agency column is NOT a second survey: it is the marketplace band multiplied by 10, the order-of-magnitude gap impact.com's 2025 rate-card data shows between managed programmes and self-serve. It is a scale factor, so it inherits every weakness of the column beside it.

The tier definitions these tables use

Every published benchmark uses tier names, and almost none of them use the same boundaries — one company's "micro" ends where another's begins, which is a large part of why two sources can disagree by a factor of five about the same creator. These are the boundaries used on this page and inside Hive's matching engine, stated so a number can be checked against them. YouTube counts subscribers for tier purposes.

Nano: under 10,000 followers
Micro: 10,000 – 99,999 followers
Mid: 100,000 – 499,999 followers
Macro: 500,000 – 999,999 followers
Mega: 1,000,000+ followers

Why an agency quote is about 10x a marketplace quote

The gap between the two price columns is not a markup on the same thing. An agency rate card prices a managed programme: creator sourcing and vetting, negotiation, contracting, briefing, revisions, legal and disclosure compliance, reporting, and the agency's own margin. A marketplace rate prices the creator's time and audience, with the brand doing the rest. impact.com's 2025 rate-card data puts that gap at roughly an order of magnitude, which is where the 10x factor in the table comes from. It is a single scale factor applied across every tier, so it is a rough instrument — the real gap is wider at the top of the market, where agency involvement is near-universal, and narrower at the bottom, where it is rare. If you are running a YouTube campaign yourself, the marketplace column is your reference; if you have been quoted from the agency column, ask what of that list you are buying.

Median YouTube engagement, and what it is measured against

Because the denominator is views rather than subscribers, YouTube's numbers describe something more useful than the other two platforms': how strongly the people who actually watched responded. The decline across tiers is steep and real — a nano channel's audience is measurably more likely to like or comment than a macro channel's — and it does not carry the mechanical distortion that inflates small-account rates elsewhere.

Median YouTube engagement rate by tier
Tier	Followers	Median engagement — (likes + comments) ÷ VIEWS
Nano	under 10,000	5.23%
Micro	10,000 – 99,999	3.74%
Mid	100,000 – 499,999	2.12%
Macro	500,000 – 999,999	1.41%
Mega	1,000,000+	1.41%

SociaVault YouTube engagement study, April 2026, 75,000 channels, medians. This is the one table on this site measured against VIEWS rather than followers. Subscriber-based engagement rate is considered misleading on YouTube — subscriber counts include long-dormant accounts, and most views on most channels do not come from subscribers.

Integration or dedicated video — the difference the tables hide

The published bands do not separate a 60-second integration inside a video the creator was making anyway from a dedicated video built around the brand. In practice these are different products at different prices, and asking which one a quote covers resolves most of the apparent disagreement between a creator's number and the table. A dedicated video also carries far more risk for the creator, whose channel performance depends on it.

Integration — a segment inside the creator's own video; the cheaper and more common format
Dedicated video — the whole upload is the campaign; priced substantially higher
Shorts, which behave and price much closer to TikTok than to long-form YouTube
Placement within the video, and whether the segment survives in the permanent upload

What campaigns are reported to return

The canonical industry figure is $5.78 of earned media value per $1 spent (Influencer Marketing Hub's benchmark report). It is worth knowing because everyone quotes it, and worth distrusting for the same reason: earned media value is a modelled quantity, not money received, and the report is built from survey responses by marketers describing their own results. The tier breakdown below is weaker still — it comes from a single vendor's dataset and Hive's benchmark file flags it as lower-confidence. Both are included here because they are the numbers the industry actually negotiates against, not because they are measurements anyone should treat as settled.

Campaign return norms by tier
Tier	Reported return per $1 spent
Nano	$6.20
Micro	$5.10
Mid	$4.30
Macro	$3.20
Mega	$2.10

LOWER CONFIDENCE — read this table more sceptically than the two above it. These figures are vendor-sourced (Janney AI, 2025, from a stated 10,000+ campaigns) and are flagged as lower-confidence in Hive's own benchmark file. Campaign-return figures are self-reported by the parties with an interest in them, attribution across social campaigns is contested, and the consistent finding that smaller creators return more per dollar is plausible but not independently verified. Do not budget off this table alone.

Affiliate link click-through, aggregator norm: 3.7% (2025–2026 aggregate figures, vendor-published)
Typical conversion rate on creator traffic: 1–3%
Reported micro-creator campaign conversion: 4.1%, versus 2.6% for macro — roughly 1.6x, and self-reported on both sides
Reference EMV constant: $5.78 per $1, widely cited and widely disputed

YouTube rates for a local brand

YouTube is the hardest of the three for a purely local brand, because channels are rarely geographically concentrated and the entry price is high. Where it does work locally is a channel whose subject is inherently local — a city guide, a regional food channel, a local sports or venue channel — and there the permanence of the asset is the real value, since it keeps being found by search long after the campaign ends.

Questions people ask

How much does a YouTube video cost in 2026?: Published marketplace benchmarks put a nano YouTube video at $200 – $1,000 and a micro one at $1,000 – $10,000. Those are vendor-compiled ranges from self-reported deals rather than a measured market price, and the same creator will quote differently depending on usage rights, exclusivity, and how many assets are in the deal.
Are these numbers Hive's own data?: No, and that distinction matters. Every figure on this page is a published third-party benchmark — Later, Shopify, impact.com, HypeAuditor, SociaVault, Socialinsider — reproduced with its source and its confidence level. Hive uses these tables to calibrate its matching engine. It has not measured any of them itself, and does not publish figures from its own marketplace here.
Which of these figures should I trust least?: The campaign-return table. It is vendor-sourced from a single dataset and is flagged lower-confidence in the file it comes from. Engagement medians are the strongest figures here — they come from the largest samples with stated formulas. The price bands sit in between: real published ranges, but wide, and compiled from self-reported deals.
Why is YouTube engagement measured against views instead of subscribers?: Because subscriber-based rates are misleading on YouTube. Subscriber lists accumulate dormant accounts, and on most channels the majority of views come from recommendations and search rather than from subscribers. Dividing by views measures the audience that actually showed up.
Are these prices for a whole video or a mention?: The published bands do not say, which is the tables' main limitation on this platform. A dedicated video sits near the top of a band and an in-video integration near the bottom. Always establish which one a quote refers to before comparing it to any benchmark.

Where these numbers come from

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