How Ground News became the #1 news app through YouTube sponsorships
How Ground News went from 100K installs to the #1 news app on the App Store with 4,579 paid YouTube sponsor reads across 801 creators. Data-backed case study.
Ground News is the #1 free news app on Apple's App Store, ahead of CNN, Fox, and the New York Times. It got there on 4,579 paid YouTube sponsor reads across 801 creators, generating 2.07 billion views over five years. No famous founder, no viral moment, and no paid-ads lead until September 2026. This is the playbook, reconstructed from every read Scout could find.
By the numbers
- 4,579 paid sponsor reads
- 801 creators
- 2.07B views on paid reads
- 100K+ → 1M+ Google Play installs
- Feb 2021 → today, and still running
Google Play only exposes install brackets, not counts. Ground News crossed 100K+ on 2020-11-13, 500K+ on 2023-03-20, and 1M+ on 2024-10-01, each verified against a Wayback Machine snapshot of the listing. Every sponsor read in this piece was detected by Scout reading the video transcript and catching the sponsor in the creator's own words, so the roster is what actually ran, not what was announced.
Where they started
Ground News is a Canadian app that shows how left, center, and right cover the same story, and what one side isn't covering at all. It's a demo product: you have to see the split to get it.
In November 2020 the Kitchener, Ontario team had just crossed 100K installs on Google Play. Their own listing still described them as "a small team."
On February 11, 2021 they bought their first paid YouTube sponsor read, on the David Pakman Show. The next year was a test: 76 reads across 38 channels, mostly small political and geopolitics shows. Pakman got 12 of them.
Then between Q1 and Q2 2022 they went from 11 reads a quarter to 57, and the program never looked back. Every install milestone since fell with the program running: 500K+ in March 2023, 1M+ in October 2024, and the #1 spot in Apple's news category by spring 2025 (CJR, September 2025).
Who they sponsored
The easy assumption is that Ground News wrote a few enormous checks to a few enormous channels. The data rules that out.
Kurzgesagt is the single biggest channel on the list, and it's 4% of views. The top 10 are 24%. You need the top 500 to reach 98%. That's the shape of a program with breadth, not a handful of headline deals.
| Slice of the sponsor list | Paid reads | Share of views |
|---|---|---|
| Top 1 channel (Kurzgesagt) | 13 | 4% |
| Top 10 | 224 | 24% |
| Top 50 | 1,533 | 56% |
| Top 200 | 2,631 | 85% |
| Top 500 | 4,072 | 98% |
| All 801 | 4,579 | 100% |
The names you recognize also arrived late. Kurzgesagt ran its first read in November 2023, Veritasium in January 2024, Johnny Harris in May 2024. By then Ground News had been running the program for three years. The big channels joined something that was already working.
The channels that actually run the machine are ones most readers have never heard of. The Conversation Project ran 610 paid reads, the most in the dataset. The Majority Report ran 195, David Pakman 189, TLDR News EU 115. Political and commentary shows with audiences already primed for news, hit again and again.
Ground News wasn't buying reach across new audiences. It was buying repetition inside the right ones.
Audience fit
Of the 291 sponsor channels Scout has full audience data for, 56% score 70+ on Scout's brand-fit model for Ground News and 96% score 50+. The median channel has 806,000 subscribers, so these are creators with real audiences, not micro-influencers used as filler. The audience skews where the product sells: 61% United States, for a Canadian company selling a US-slanted media-bias product.
The filter wasn't "who agreed to a deal." It was "which audience matches the product." That's curation, and it's the part of the playbook most brands skip.
Why YouTube
Ground News is a high-consideration product. The viewer has to see the app, watch the split, and understand what a "blindspot" is before the ask makes sense. That takes 60 to 90 seconds.
A YouTube mid-roll gives a creator 90 to 120 seconds inside a lean-back session the viewer is already in. A Short, Reel, or TikTok gives 15 to 60 seconds where the call-to-action is the whole message. And the creator audience on YouTube overlaps the buyer almost 1:1: explainer, analysis, and long-form politics viewers have already opted into "I want to understand things deeply." Short-form would offer 10x the reach at a fraction of that density.
We can find no meaningful paid TikTok or Instagram creator presence for Ground News. The brand made a deliberate five-year channel bet on YouTube and layered everything else on top later.
Why the reads compound
This is the finding that separates sponsorships from paid ads, and it only shows up when you look at the stock of reads rather than the flow.
A paid ad stops working the day the budget stops. A sponsor read lives as long as the video does: it sits in Recommended, gets rewatched, and surfaces on every "media bias" or "how to read the news" search for years. So the thing that should predict adoption isn't what shipped this quarter. It's everything that's live.
Grouping the 22 quarters since 2021 by how many sponsored-video views were already on YouTube: under 250M views live, Ground News averaged 41 new US App Store reviews a quarter. Between 250M and 1B, 83. Over 1B, 101. Correlation between cumulative sponsor views and new reviews per quarter is r = 0.88, and it's stronger with a two-quarter lag than same-quarter. Reviews track what's already out there, not what just dropped.
Apple doesn't publish install counts, so written reviews are an adoption signal, not a signup number. But the direction is hard to argue with: every extra 100M cumulative sponsor views has been worth roughly three more new reviews a quarter, and the 2024 reads are still converting in 2026.
How they staffed it
Ground News's applicant tracking system is public, and two dates on it matter.
On October 31, 2024, they posted an "Influencer Marketing Manager" role on a dedicated Sponsorship team. That's the moment the program got a full-time owner. In the 12 months that followed, Ground News crossed the 1M+ Google Play bracket and reached #1 in Apple's news category, and paid-read volume roughly doubled.
On September 11, 2026, they posted an "Associate Director, Google Ads" role on a new Revenue Growth & Analytics team. That's the first paid-ads leadership role to appear on the board in the entire two-year window.
Sponsorships got the headcount first. Paid ads got a lead almost two years later, on top of an install base the sponsor program had already built. Most consumer brands run this sequence in the opposite order.
What this means for your brand
If you sell a high-consideration product, a demo-heavy app, a subscription, anything that needs a minute to explain, long-form YouTube is the channel that gives you the minute. Short-form gives you the impression.
Buy audience fit, not subscriber count. Ground News's roster is 800 channels with a median of 806K subscribers, chosen because the viewer already looks like the buyer. Three enormous channels would have cost more and converted worse.
Run it as a program, not a campaign. The Conversation Project ran 610 reads. The Majority Report ran 195. The same audience, hit weekly, for years, is what turned a test into a #1 ranking.
Staff it early. The influencer marketing hire came before the paid-ads hire, and the program doubled after it.
Methodology
Sponsor reads. Scout indexes YouTube transcripts and classifies brand mentions as Dedicated, Integrated, Affiliate, or Organic. This case study counts only paid reads (Integrated or Dedicated), deduped by video: 4,579 reads across 801 channels, 2.07B views measured 2026-09-15. Scout's full Ground News roster is larger (7,592 videos across 1,108 channels) once affiliate links and unpaid mentions are included; we excluded those so every number here reflects money changing hands. A sponsored video whose transcript we don't have doesn't appear, so these are floors.
Installs. Google Play exposes brackets, not counts. Bracket crossings are verified against Wayback Machine snapshots of the Ground News listing on the dates given.
iOS adoption. Apple publishes no install counts. We use new US written App Store reviews per quarter as an adoption signal (1,693 reviews, 2018 to 2026, via Apify). Correlation is not causation; the chart overlays the two series and we let it speak.
Hiring. Wayback snapshots and the live Ashby job board for Ground News, 34 distinct postings first seen mid-2024 to today.
What nobody outside can see. Ground News told CJR it declined to share subscriber numbers. There are no filings; it's a private Canadian company. We have no signup counts, revenue, or CAC, and neither does anyone else outside the building. Everything here is observable from the product, the public job board, Scout's transcript index, or press we cite by URL.
Find the creators for your brand
Ground News found its 801 channels one deal at a time over five years. Scout reads YouTube transcripts and shows you who's actually sponsoring in your category, which channels fit your audience, and how to reach them, so finding your 800 takes an afternoon.
Run your first search free. Describe your product in plain English and Scout returns vetted creators with sponsor history, audience fit, and contact details. Start free or book a demo.
Frequently asked questions
How many YouTube sponsorships has Ground News done? 4,579 paid sponsor reads across 801 creators since February 2021, per Scout's transcript-derived index (measured 2026-09-15). Combined views on those reads: 2.07 billion. Including affiliate links and unpaid mentions, Ground News appears in 7,592 videos across 1,108 channels.
Which YouTubers does Ground News sponsor? Kurzgesagt, Veritasium, Johnny Harris, Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan, LegalEagle, StarTalk, CaspianReport, and Linus Tech Tips among the big names. Most of the volume comes from political and commentary channels like The Conversation Project, The Majority Report, David Pakman Show, and TLDR News.
How much does Ground News spend on YouTube sponsorships? They don't disclose it. Applying public creator RPM benchmarks ($2 to $5 per 1,000 views) to the 2.07B observed views gives an estimate of roughly $4M to $10M cumulative. Arithmetic in the appendix.
Do YouTube sponsorships work for app growth? For Ground News, every install milestone (500K+, 1M+, #1 in the App Store's news category) fell with the program running, and new App Store reviews per quarter rose from ~40 to ~100 as cumulative sponsor views grew. Sponsor reads keep converting long after they run.
What is Ground News's revenue? Not public. Ground News is a private Kitchener, Ontario company and told CJR it declined to share subscriber numbers. This case study uses only observable proxies.
Appendix: estimating the spend
Everything above is observed. If you want a dollar figure anyway, here's the arithmetic, using public benchmarks and no proprietary information.
Inputs: 2.07B views on paid reads (Scout, through 2026-09-15). Sponsored-video creator RPMs of $2 to $5 per 1,000 views, a wide range for direct integrations; actual rates depend on integration length, exclusivity, and creator leverage.
Est. total program spend: 2.07B × $2 / 1,000 ≈ $4.1M (low). 2.07B × $5 / 1,000 ≈ $10.4M (high).
Est. cost per net-new Android install, attributing 100% of Android growth to the program (which overstates it) and assuming a 2M to 3M Android base today: $1.40 to $5.50 per install. Publicly reported CPI benchmarks for news and information apps in North America generally run mid-single-digits on Meta. Even at the high end of the estimate, this program lands in or below that range, and it attributes iOS installs to zero.
This is one arithmetic frame, not a forecast. Change either input and the answer moves.
Data measured 2026-09-15. Sponsor reads via Scout, search_videos_by_sponsored_brand. Play Store snapshots at web.archive.org. Ashby postings via web.archive.org and api.ashbyhq.com. App Store reviews via Apify, US, 1,693 reviews 2018 to 2026.
