👋 Today, we’re following the money. Which brand categories are cashing cheques right now?

Buy-side autopsy aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

Who's Writing the Sponsorship Cheques in 2026

This time, we flipped our HubSpot dive the other way around. Instead of looking at what publishers earn, we looked at what brands spend.

Cross-referenced our internal numbers, 2,600 deals across newsletters, podcasts, creators, and broader trends. Tagged each by buyer category, looked at deal volume, average deal size, and close rate, etc.

Then cross-referenced against IAB's 2026 Creator Economy report and emarketer's buyer outlook to make sure our book wasn't whack. Directionally, it isn't.

Same caveat as last week: this is our book, with public benchmarks where the sample was thin…

Every operator I talk to has a list of "we want to work with" brands.

Hardly any of them have a list of "brand categories actually spending right now."

That's a problem. The brands writing big cheques in 2026 are not the same categories that wrote them in 2023.

Here's where the money is actually flowing right now.

🎯 The 5 core categories

In order…

🔎 AI SaaS. 

The fastest-rising category in our 2026 book. Buyers are obsessed with reach into developer, founder, and leadership audiences. ElevenLabs, Lovable, Attio, and a long tail of $10-100M ARR ‘startups’, all spending hard on creator and newsletter direct.

Average deal sizes here have jumped sharply year over year. Investorideas, summarising 22k brand collaborations, flags AI and SaaS as the sectors "reshaping creator economy spend."

I agree.

🔎 High-LTV health. 

Supplements, longevity, sleep, fitness tech. The customer is worth four-figure-plus lifetime, so they can stomach premium CPMs and still be laughing. Function Health, AG1, Whoop, Eight Sleep, the usual suspects.

🔎 B2B SaaS, non-AI core. 

The steady workhorse. CRMs, RevOps, project management, dev tooling that isn't pitching itself as AI-first software. Although there’s a blurry line these days.

🔎 High-LTV consumer apps 

Therapy, education, fintech-with-a-human-on-the-other-end. BetterHelp, MasterClass, MoneyLion-types. Long-form creator audiences convert way better than paid social for this category.

Trust is my guess as to why.

🔎 Retail investing and crypto. 

Public, Robinhood, Webull, plus a wave of retail crypto and prediction-market apps. CACs are high, so the CPMs they pay are too. Volatile spend though, when markets dip, so do their budgets, especially crypto!.

Definitely spending a LOT less than a few years ago, around 2023, but still making the top 5.

Spend is increasingly concentrated. These five categories carry most of your closable pipeline, unless you’re super niche, then lean into that!

The romantic idea of "I'll just close brands across every vertical" doesn't pan out fantastically long-term any more.

🔧 What you should actually do

If your audience matches AI SaaS buyers (founders, developers, ops, creators-who-build), get aggressive now. AI SaaS is bubbly. Marketing budgets will fall when funding dries up, or Open AI goes bankrupt (etc).

Lock in winning brands now, and they’ll stick with the partners that work for them long-term.

If B2B SaaS, non-AI core: chase the renewal more than the initial deal. Renewal close rates dwarf first-time close rates in our book. Build ops around making the first campaign great.

If high-LTV consumer is a fit for you, just lean into the products most endemic.

I always say it, but health newsletters are few and far between, and these high LTV health brands are chomping at the bit for decent audiences!

💡 Which vertical should I target?

The best vertical is the one that your audience actually best fits. There are no sales hacks in the world that will convince Hubspot that your audience of kitten enthusiasts is a fit for them.

Not to mention that AD CTR… meow.

But of course, if editorially, the AI SaaS angle is there, it is the deepest pocket in 2026.

P.S. Need help selling more sponsorships? My agency Ad Sales as a Service helps new media companies do just that.