Top Tech Brands That Sponsor YouTubers
YouTube has become one of the most effective advertising channels for technology companies. A single video from a creator with a few million subscribers can move more product than a traditional TV spot, and the audience trusts the person on screen in a way they never trusted a commercial. Tech brands figured this out early, and now sponsorships are woven into the fabric of almost every major tech channel on the platform.
If you watch tech YouTube regularly, you already know the names. The same brands appear week after week, funding videos about laptops, phones, cables, and software. Understanding who these brands are, what they want, and how these deals actually work gives you a sharper lens for evaluating everything you watch.
The Brands You Will See Every Week
VPN Companies
NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and Surfshark are probably the most ubiquitous sponsors across all of tech YouTube, and honestly across YouTube in general. These companies spend aggressively on creator partnerships because the product is digital, the margins are high, and the audience skews toward exactly the kind of person who might want a VPN: someone who spends a lot of time online and cares about privacy or accessing geo-restricted content.
The sponsorship segments for VPN services tend to follow a nearly identical script regardless of the creator: mention a threat (public Wi-Fi, data tracking), explain what a VPN does, offer a discount code, and move on. The repetition is noticeable, but it works. Researchers have estimated that influencer VPN ad views on YouTube alone have surpassed 4.5 billion.
PC Hardware and Peripherals
ASUS, MSI, Corsair, Razer, and SteelSeries all run active creator programs. These brands have a natural home on YouTube because their products are visual and performance-driven. Watching someone demonstrate a mechanical keyboard or show off RGB lighting on a GPU cooler is far more compelling than reading a spec sheet.
ASUS in particular has built a strong presence through its ROG (Republic of Gamers) and ProArt lines, sponsoring channels that cover gaming hardware, content creation setups, and laptop reviews. Corsair does similar work with memory, cases, and peripherals. These deals often involve sending hardware for review alongside a paid integration, which creates a complicated dynamic worth examining later.
Monitors and Displays
LG, Samsung, and BenQ sponsor heavily in the creator and gaming space. Monitor sponsorships are especially common on channels focused on video editing, color grading, and professional workflows, where the display is central to the content. A colorist or photographer talking about color accuracy on a sponsored LG OLED monitor is a natural fit, even if the financial relationship behind it deserves some scrutiny.
Mobile Accessories and Charging
Anker is one of the most consistent sponsors in the tech space. The company makes charging cables, power banks, wireless chargers, and audio products, and it has built much of its brand recognition through YouTube partnerships rather than traditional retail advertising. dbrand, known for its phone skins and cases, is another brand that has cultivated a strong YouTube presence, partly through a sharp, self-aware marketing voice that plays well with tech audiences.
Web Hosting and Software
Squarespace, Hostinger, and Wix appear constantly on channels where the audience includes creators, developers, or small business owners. These are high-margin subscription products, which makes the economics of creator sponsorships very attractive. Notion, a productivity app, has also run extensive creator campaigns, particularly on channels whose audiences include students and knowledge workers.
Security Software
NordPass (the password manager from the same company behind NordVPN), Bitdefender, and Malwarebytes show up regularly. Security software has a similar appeal to VPNs from a sponsorship standpoint: the product is invisible, the fear-based pitch is easy to deliver in 60 seconds, and the audience is already primed to care about digital safety.
How These Sponsorship Deals Actually Work
Most tech YouTube sponsorships fall into a few categories. Understanding the structure helps you read the content more clearly.
Dedicated videos are entirely about the sponsor's product. The creator is paid to make a video reviewing or showcasing something specific. These are the most transparent deals because the entire video is the advertisement.
Integrated segments are the 60-to-90-second spots dropped into the middle of an otherwise unrelated video. The creator might be reviewing a CPU and then pivot to talk about NordVPN for a minute before returning to the benchmark results. These are the most common format.
Gifted products with no payment are less formal arrangements where a brand sends hardware hoping the creator will cover it. This is not technically a sponsorship, but it still creates an implicit relationship. Many creators disclose these as "provided by the company" without clarifying whether money changed hands.
The rates vary enormously based on channel size, niche, and engagement. As a general pattern, influencer pricing increases with audience size, production effort, and past performance metrics like average views and engagement. Smaller channels might accept product-only deals. The economics are opaque from the outside.
The Brands That Invest Most Heavily
A few companies stand out for the sheer volume and consistency of their YouTube presence.
Corsair has built what amounts to an entire marketing strategy around creator partnerships. The brand appears on channels covering PC building, gaming, and streaming setups. Its product range is broad enough that almost any tech channel can find something relevant to feature.
ASUS runs one of the more sophisticated influencer programs in the hardware space, with tiered relationships ranging from casual product loans to long-term ambassador deals. The ROG brand in particular has become synonymous with gaming YouTube.
Anker deserves special mention for how effectively it has used YouTube to build brand recognition in a product category (charging accessories) that would otherwise be invisible. Most people could not name a charging cable brand before Anker's YouTube push. Now many can.
Nord Security (the parent company of NordVPN and NordPass) may spend more on creator partnerships than any other single tech brand. Their products appear on channels that have nothing to do with technology: cooking channels, travel vlogs, finance channels. The scale of the operation is remarkable.
Squarespace has been running creator sponsorships for years and has refined its pitch to the point where many creators deliver it almost identically. The brand has become a kind of cultural shorthand for YouTube sponsorships in general.
Can You Trust Sponsored Content?
This is the question that sits underneath all of it, and the honest answer is: sometimes, with conditions.
The Federal Trade Commission in the United States requires creators to disclose material connections to brands, meaning paid arrangements and free product deals alike, and most major creators do comply, at least technically. A "this video is sponsored by" disclaimer at the start or a note in the description satisfies the legal requirement. Whether it satisfies the spirit of transparency is a different matter. Under FTC rules, disclosure placement matters: a disclosure buried on a profile page does not count as clear and conspicuous because viewers of the paid posts could easily miss it. Compliance is also inconsistent across platforms: one report found partnership disclosure rates of 52% on TikTok, 42% on YouTube, and just 29% on Instagram.
The core tension is this: a creator who says negative things about a sponsor will not get sponsored by that company again. The financial incentive runs entirely in one direction. This does not mean every sponsored review is dishonest, but it does mean you should apply more skepticism to sponsored content than to content with no financial relationship to the product being discussed.
Some creators handle this well. They maintain clear editorial separation between sponsored segments and their actual reviews. They will take a sponsor's money for a 60-second VPN spot and then, in the same video, give an honest and sometimes critical assessment of a piece of hardware that was provided by a different company. The two things can coexist.
Others blur the line significantly. A creator who receives a monitor for free, gets paid for a dedicated video about it, and then gives it a glowing review without mentioning any weaknesses is not lying exactly, but they are not giving you the full picture either.
A few things to watch for:
- Does the creator mention any downsides or limitations of the sponsored product?
- Do they compare it honestly to competitors?
- Is the sponsorship disclosed clearly at the start, or buried in the description?
- Does the creator have a track record of criticizing products from brands they have worked with?
- Are they reviewing the product themselves, or just reading talking points provided by the brand?
The creators who have built the most durable trust with their audiences are usually the ones who have, at some point, said something unflattering about a sponsor or turned down a deal that did not fit their standards. That kind of behavior is visible over time if you follow a channel closely.
What This Means for Viewers
Knowing which brands sponsor heavily does not mean you should dismiss every video that features them. It means you should watch with some awareness of the financial relationships at play.
A VPN sponsorship segment tells you almost nothing about whether that VPN is actually good. The creator is reading a script, not giving you their honest assessment. But a creator's actual review of a router or a laptop, even if the hardware was provided for free, can still be valuable if the creator has a history of honest coverage.
The most useful approach is to treat sponsored segments as advertisements (because they are) and treat the surrounding content on its own merits. If a creator you trust recommends a product in a non-sponsored context, that carries more weight than any paid integration. If a product only ever appears in sponsored contexts and never gets mentioned organically, that tells you something too.
The Bigger Picture
Tech YouTube sponsorships are not going away. The economics work too well for both sides. Brands get access to engaged, targeted audiences at a cost-per-engagement for influencer campaigns that research puts at $0.82, compared to $3.24 for traditional advertising formats. Creators get revenue that lets them produce content full-time.
The system works best when creators maintain genuine independence and audiences stay appropriately skeptical. It breaks down when financial relationships start shaping editorial decisions in ways that are not disclosed.
The brands listed here, NordVPN, Corsair, ASUS, Anker, Squarespace, and the rest, are not villains for running creator programs. They are companies doing what companies do. The responsibility for maintaining trust sits with the creators who take the money and with the viewers who decide how much weight to give what they see.
Watch the content. Enjoy the production value. Buy the products that genuinely fit your needs. Just remember that the 60-second segment in the middle of your favorite tech video is an advertisement, regardless of how naturally it flows from the creator's mouth.