How Mint Mobile Sold $15 Phone Plans on Comedy and Fishing YouTube Channels

We tracked 9,327 Mint Mobile sponsor placements across 991 YouTube creators and 601.7 million views. Mint paid for less than a third of them.

Mint Mobile skipped the Super Bowl. Instead of paying more than $5 million for thirty seconds, Ryan Reynolds bought a full page of the New York Times for $125,000 to explain that he had skipped the Super Bowl, and said the savings went to customers.

That is the Mint Mobile most people remember. Reynolds took a majority stake in the carrier in late 2019, pointed his own agency at it, and made the company famous on a budget that would not cover a single quarter of a Verizon campaign. Mint's marketing chief Aron North put the strategy plainly in The Drum: "Look, I'm never gonna outspend Verizon and AT&T. These people have billion dollar budgets." His answer was to fight somewhere else. "We're fighting where they aren't," he said, "and talking to people in a way that other brands don't."

Underneath the famous ads, Mint was doing exactly that, in a place almost nobody wrote about. Over the next six years its name appeared in 9,327 sponsored YouTube placements worth 601.7 million views: a Magic: The Gathering show, a fishing channel, a reddit-stories and pop-culture channel, a daily movie-news host. Mint commissioned 2,911 of those placements. The other 6,416 are affiliate links creators put in their own descriptions, and 202 of the channels carrying one never took a cent of Mint's sponsorship budget.

Mint got the part it paid for badly wrong in the middle, and then it rebuilt it. Here is what each era delivered.

Mint Mobile's YouTube sponsorships by the numbers

• 9,327 sponsored placements across 991 creators, worth 601.7 million views, from January 2021 through September 13, 2026
• 6,416 of those placements are affiliate links creators posted in their own descriptions, 69% of all placements and 15% of the views
• The 2,911 Mint commissioned are its bought program. Measured on its own roster, that program is 2,905 reads from 789 creators, worth 509.3 million views
• Three eras in the bought program, measured by median views per placement: 32.3K to 120.0K, then a fall to 3,447, then a recovery to 97.2K
• The floor quarter is 2024-Q2, the quarter T-Mobile closed its acquisition of Mint
• 89% of the rebuild-era roster had never run a Mint read before
• 52% of the views from nine of Mint's ten biggest channels by bought views went to audiences outside the United States
• Mint's branded search peaked at 1.02 million a month in August 2024, in the middle of the era with the bought program's worst numbers

Everything in the three era sections below counts bought reads only. Counting affiliate links alongside them puts Mint's busiest quarter in 2023-Q1, where 642 of the 816 placements are a single boilerplate line pasted into one channel's descriptions. The trust section explains why.

Mint Mobile's YouTube program, era by era

Mint's bought program has three distinct shapes, and the tell is not how many reads it bought. It is how many views each read delivered.

Read the table like a spreadsheet. The middle era bought the most: about 5.5x the quarterly volume of the era before, peaking at 339 reads in a single quarter. It is also the era in which the typical Mint placement fell to a few thousand views.

Era one: the boutique program, 2021 to mid-2022

The window we can measure opens in January 2021, about a year after Reynolds bought in, and Mint was already buying carefully. Across six quarters it never ran more than 71 bought reads.

The medians were enormous:

• 75,598 views per read in 2021-Q1
• 120,035 in 2022-Q1, the highest quarterly median in the entire six-year window
• On the floored roster, the same quarters run 38,990 up to 177,878

Mint was buying few, large placements from people with real audiences. It never once bought more reads in a quarter than the single quietest quarter of what came next.

Then Mint changed its mind about what a placement was for.

Era two: the volume grind, 2022 to 2025

From 2022-Q3 the program inverted. Bought reads jumped from 28–71 a quarter to 148 in 2022-Q3, and across eleven quarters they averaged 203 a quarter against the boutique era's 37. The peak, 339, lands in 2024-Q3.

The median views per placement went the other way:

• 18,208 in 2022-Q3
• 13,114 by 2023-Q1
• 5,042 by 2024-Q1
• 3,447 at the floor, 2024-Q2

The fall is a trend rather than a straight line (five quarters inside the era posted an uptick), but after 2023-Q1 no quarter reached five figures again until the rebuild.

You can see what was being bought. John Campea, a daily movie-news show, ran 215 bought Mint reads between April 2022 and July 2024, more than any creator Mint actually paid, at a median of 41,288 views. Further down, LAFB Network ran 49 of its 51 Mint reads in these quarters, at a median of 36 views. Across the whole window, 353 of Mint's 3,258 bought reads (about 11%) went to channels whose median sponsored video never cleared a thousand views, and 262 of those 353 sit inside this era.

The acquisition landed in the middle of this. T-Mobile closed its purchase of Mint on May 1, 2024, one month into the 3,447 floor quarter.

Mint's branded search peaked during the grind. US searches for "mint mobile" averaged:

• 497,000 a month across the boutique era
• 771,000 a month across the grind
• 684,000 a month across the rebuild
• All-time peak of 1.02 million in August 2024

The era with the worst views per placement is the era when the most Americans were typing Mint's name into Google. Mint was running television, radio, retail and Reynolds through all of it, so the search line belongs to the whole company and not to the YouTube program. We can show the two series side by side. We cannot tell you which one moved the other. The honest reading is narrower than it looks: the quarters with the program's worst views per placement were not quarters in which Mint went quiet.

Why YouTube instead of another TV commercial

Mint built its fame on things shaped like television commercials: the bear trap, the 5G explainer, Rick Moranis, a PowerPoint. Reynolds called the method fast-vertising, and the point was always to spend less and move faster than a carrier with a billion-dollar budget.

The reason the YouTube program sat underneath all of that is now easier to see than it was in 2021. In May 2026, Nielsen measured YouTube at 13.8% of all television watch time in the United States, its best month on record and the largest share of American TV viewing of any distributor for the third month running. Disney was second at 10.0%. The largest thing on the American television set is YouTube.

A thirty-second spot interrupts a show. A sponsor read is delivered by the person the viewer came for, inside the show, in their own words, and it stays searchable for years. Mint's 2,905 bought reads carry 509.3 million lifetime views. That is the part a commercial cannot do, and it is the clearest expression of North's "fighting where they aren't."

Buying inside somebody else's show means buying their audience, exactly as it is.

Era three: the rebuild after T-Mobile

After April 2025, Mint's program changed shape a third time.

Volume did not go back to grind levels. Bought reads settled at 82 to 183 a quarter, against 129 to 339 across the last five quarters of the grind. The medians recovered:

• 33,295 in 2025-Q2
• 78,353 in 2025-Q3
• 94,893 in 2026-Q1
• 97,179 in 2026-Q3

On the floored roster the rebuild runs 45,141 to 125,711, back inside boutique-era territory.

It did it with almost entirely different people. Of the 372 channels that ran a bought Mint read in the rebuild era, 42 had ever run one before. 89% of the roster was new.

The era's signature placement shows what that buying looks like at the top end. In April 2025, Hank Green published a dedicated video titled "5 Terrible Reasons Not to Switch to Mint Mobile (and two good ones)." It has 1.72 million views, which is 90% of the 1.90 million across the 17 dedicated videos on Mint's floored roster, and 89% of the 1.92 million across all 42 dedicated videos the program ever ran. One upload, from a creator Mint had not bought before, outweighs every other dedicated video it ever ran, combined.

Mint's organic search traffic peaked after the acquisition, at 1.22 million US visits a month in 2025-Q3, against era averages of 342,000 (boutique), 689,000 (grind) and 985,000 (rebuild). The site was at its biggest more than a year after the sale, while the program bought about two fifths as many reads per quarter as at the peak. In 2026-Q3 the median bought read drew 97,179 views against 4,630 in the 339-read peak quarter of 2024-Q3, a factor of 21.

Two things changed at once: fewer, larger placements, and a roster rebuilt from scratch. We cannot separate them with this data, and we are not claiming the program caused the traffic. The shape worth copying is the one Mint arrived at, which looks much more like 2021 than 2023.

Which YouTubers Mint Mobile sponsored

Ranked by sponsored views, counting every placement type, Mint's roster does not look like a phone company's roster.

A talk podcast, a sketch-comedy channel, a reddit-stories and pop-culture channel, a fishing channel, a cell phone plan reviewer, a Magic: The Gathering show, a food talk show, a shorts creator, a men's-lifestyle magazine and a comedy podcast. One of them is about phones, and he is the only one on the list Mint essentially never paid.

Three of Mint's buys carry the whole lesson:

• Smosh Pit, the ceiling. 8 bought reads, 31.6 million views, a median of 4.0 million per placement. Eight buys from a sketch-comedy channel out-delivered Mint's most-bought creator by 22.4 million views.
• John Campea, the grind. 239 Mint placements, 215 of them bought reads: more than Mint paid any other creator. Those 215 returned 9.2 million views; all 239 together returned 9.8 million, which lands him eleventh. Buy the same daily show 215 times and a channel that ran eight still beats your whole total more than threefold.
• Westen Champlin, the one that got away. One bought read in September 2026, 8.6 million views. That single placement is larger than the best single placement any of the ten channels above ever delivered, and the second largest sponsored Mint placement in the index. It was his first Mint read.

The pattern across all three: the size of the buy and the size of the result have almost nothing to do with each other. Our other case studies on Quince, Chime and Ground News show the same gap in different categories.

Where Mint Mobile's sponsored audience lives

Mint Mobile sells a phone plan on T-Mobile's American network. Its coverage page says Mint's 5G reaches "98% of Americans." There is no version of Mint you can buy in Manila, Mumbai or Manchester.

We pulled audience estimates for the ten channels that delivered Mint the most views on reads it paid for (a slightly different ten from the all-placement table above). Nine had enough data to read. Together they carry 174.7 million views, and 91.0 million of them (52%) belong to people who do not live in the United States.

It is not one bad buy dragging an average. Nine of Mint's ten biggest channels by bought views, with the share of their audience that is American:

• GroovyGavin: 33% American
• Sambucha: 38% American, with more followers in India than in Canada and Australia combined
• RAWWFishing: 43% American, with more viewers in India and the Philippines combined than in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada combined
• Speeed: 45% American
• imactuallyLazy: 46% American
• Smosh Pit: 51% American
• H3 Podcast: 52% American
• Good Mythical Morning: 53% American
• The Command Zone: 54% American, the most American channel in the set

Nothing in the set clears 55%.

The rest of the targeting is good. Across the nine, view-weighted, Mint's bought audience is 59% male and 59% aged 25 to 34, close to the center of the prepaid switcher market. Mint got the person right and the passport wrong. For a brand selling a $15 American phone plan, that is roughly half the delivered reach spent on people who cannot become customers.

Two kinds of creator trust: owned and earned

Mint's whole advertising thesis was that somebody the audience already likes should be the one to tell you about the product. Reynolds was that at the top of the funnel: one recognizable face, attached to the company for years, with the owner's incentive to keep showing up. It is the most expensive version of the idea, and almost no brand can buy it.

His own channel also shows how little a placement count can tell you. All 38 of its Mint videos are classified as organic rather than sponsored, so the two most-watched Mint videos on YouTube, at 10.8 million and 10.3 million views, do not appear in a single figure in this piece.

The cheapest version of the same idea is sitting at number five on that table, and Mint was barely paying for it.

Stetson Doggett reviews cell phone plans. He runs multi-hour live streams with titles like "9 Best Cell Phone Plans End of 2023!" and "DON'T Buy Your iPhone 18 Pro Max From Your Carrier (Buy From Here Instead)." His audience is 81% American, 84% male and 45% over the age of 35. Among the other channels his viewers watch are Clark Howard, The Deal Guy, and T-Mobile's own YouTube channel.

That 81% is the most American audience of any channel whose audience we sampled. The best any channel in the bought top ten manages is 54%.

Mint bought one read from him. One, in a November 2023 video that did 147,543 views. The other 163 of his 164 Mint placements are affiliate links he put in his own descriptions, and he was still posting Mint links in August 2026, years after the single invoice.

He is not an isolated case. 280 channels posted Mint affiliate links over the window, and 202 of them never received a bought read at all. That is a standing sales force Mint did not commission, pointed at exactly the customer Mint sells to.

The same bucket also shows what a link looks like when there is no trust behind it. DennisCW is a Tesla channel that uploads five to ten videos a day, mostly Shorts. Its Mint rows run from 2021 to 2025 and concentrate in 2023 and 2024. Two we opened, three months apart, carry the same 4,614-character description, one line of which reads "Visit our partner trymintmobile.com/denniscw to get 3 months of premium wireless for $15 a month." That one standing link becomes:

• 2,227 placements total
• 35% of every Mint affiliate row in the data
• 1,341 rows in 2023 alone, which is 45% of every Mint placement that year

Those 2,227 placements carry a median of 1,452 views each. Stetson's 164 carry a median of 31,750. Both are affiliate links. Only one of them is an endorsement, and the count column cannot tell them apart.

Count every placement and 2023 is Mint's biggest year on YouTube. Count only what Mint bought and the program peaks a year later, in the quarter after T-Mobile closed.

The playbook: four lessons from Mint's program

1. Count what you bought, not what got posted. More than two thirds of Mint's placements are affiliate links, and a third of those are one description line repeated under 2,227 uploads. Ranked by raw placements, a Tesla channel's boilerplate is Mint's biggest partner. Report the two programs separately or the boilerplate sets your strategy.

2. Watch median views per placement, not placements. In 2022-Q3 Mint bought 148 reads at a median of 18,208 views. In 2024-Q3 it bought 339 at a median of 4,630. A placement dashboard showed the program growing 2.3x. Each placement was delivering a quarter of the audience. The rebuild went the other way: about two fifths as many reads per quarter from a roster 89% new, at 21x the median views per read.

3. Check where the audience lives before you buy the reach. Mint sells US phone service. Of the 174.7 million bought views from its biggest channels with audience data, 52% went to people outside the country, and not one of those channels clears 55% American. The age and gender targeting was sound, which is what makes the country figure expensive: everything else about the buy was right.

4. Find out who is already selling you for free. The most American audience we sampled in Mint's roster belongs to a creator it paid once in six years. 202 channels posted Mint links without ever getting a read. Before building a roster from scratch, look at who is already doing it unpaid. They have picked your product out of a category on their own, in front of an audience they chose: the one signal a media kit cannot fake.

Methodology

Placement data comes from the Scout index of YouTube sponsorships, pulled October 9, 2026: 20,594 Mint Mobile rows across all placement types, of which uploads through September 13, 2026 are analyzed.

Sponsored placements are integrated host reads, dedicated videos and affiliate links. Organic mentions are excluded everywhere. Rows are deduplicated by video, keeping the strongest placement type per video. Channels whose median sponsored video drew under 1,000 views are excluded from the roster table and the headline totals. That exclusion is a floor on what a chart can honestly show, not a judgment about which relationships are real. On that basis Mint has 9,327 sponsored placements across 991 creators, worth 601.7 million views.

"Bought reads" means integrated host reads and dedicated videos only, with the channel floor recomputed across that narrower set: 2,905 reads, 789 creators, 509.3 million views, which removes 63 channels and 353 reads. Affiliate links are creator-posted referral links and are reported separately throughout. Because the two bases recompute the floor over different sets, the bought component of the 9,327 is 2,911 rather than 2,905, a net difference of six reads (twelve reads sit on two channels that clear the wider floor and fall under the narrower one, and six reads on two channels that do the reverse). Every bought figure quoted here uses the stricter 2,905.

The three era sections, the quarterly series and the hero chart count bought reads only. Quarterly reads and medians are computed before the channel floor is applied, on 3,258 reads, so that a quarter's volume is not changed by a channel's lifetime median; applying the floor moves the trough from 3,447 in 2024-Q2 to 6,175 in 2024-Q1 and leaves the three-era shape unchanged. The rebuild-era roster figure of 42 carried channels out of 372 is also on the unfloored basis.

Sources:

• Placement data. Scout YouTube sponsorship index, pulled 2026-10-09, series through 2026-09-13.
• Site traffic and branded search. Ahrefs US estimates for mintmobile.com and the keyword "mint mobile", 69 monthly points January 2021 to September 2026, no gaps.
• Audience location, age and gender. Scout engager-based estimates from follower samples, not a census. John Campea's audience could not be sampled after three attempts and is excluded from the audience figures and labeled on the chart.
• Television viewing share. Nielsen The Gauge, May 2026.
• Partial quarter. 2026-Q3 is partial in every series: placement data runs through September 13, 2026, and the quarter ends September 30.

Sponsorships, site traffic and branded search are shown side by side. We do not claim that one caused another.

Find the creators already selling your category

Mint's best-performing placements came from channels nobody would have shortlisted for a phone company, and its most American audience belonged to a creator it paid once. Scout indexes which brands are already sponsoring which creators, which creators are posting your links unpaid, what each placement delivered, and where each creator's audience actually lives, so the country problem in this case study is visible before you buy.

Run your first search free. See every creator Mint Mobile has sponsored, or run your own search free.

Mint Mobile YouTube sponsorship FAQ

How many YouTube sponsorships has Mint Mobile run? Scout's index holds 9,327 sponsored Mint placements from 991 creators between January 2021 and September 13, 2026, worth 601.7 million views. Mint commissioned 2,911 of them. On its own roster that bought program is 2,905 reads from 789 creators, worth 509.3 million views. The other 6,416 are affiliate links creators posted in their own descriptions.

Who is Mint Mobile's biggest YouTube creator? By sponsored views, H3 Podcast with 45.6 million views across 25 reads. By number of reads Mint actually paid for, John Campea with 215 reads worth 9.2 million views.

Did Mint Mobile's YouTube sponsorships cause its growth? We cannot show that, and we do not claim it. Mint ran television, radio, retail and a celebrity-owner campaign over the same period. This case study shows the sponsorship program and Mint's public growth proxies side by side.

Why separate affiliate links from bought reads? Because they are different purchases. 6,416 of the 9,327 placements are affiliate links, and 2,227 of those are a single description line one channel pasted under every upload for years. Counted as one bucket, that channel becomes Mint's largest partner by placements, ahead of every creator Mint actually hired.

What happened to Mint Mobile's YouTube program after T-Mobile bought it? It got smaller, and each read delivered far more. Bought reads settled at 82 to 183 a quarter against a peak of 339, median views per read recovered from 3,447 to 97,179, and 89% of the rebuild-era roster had never run a Mint read before.

Data measured on the 2026-10-09 Scout export, series through 2026-09-13.