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Hello and welcome to How to Build Brands and Influence People, your paradigmatic entity for the creator economy. My name is Alex Rawitz, Director of Research & Insights at CreatorIQ, and if you read last week’s newsletter on Dutch Bros, you’ll know that I’m all about bringing the energy! (If you’ve met me, you might find this hard to believe, but I digress.)
While my newfound love of caffeine might be supercharging my content creation efforts, it also poses a bit of a conundrum. You see, once I set a new baseline for my energy level, it becomes harder to feel the jolt I’m chasing. Sugary coffee beverages are all well and good, but what if I need something more concentrated, more powerful? Something to fuel me further, and keep the buzz going even longer?
Fortunately, there’s room in a healthy diet for many different kinds of energy drinks (note: I am not a medical professional). While the neon-colored, customizable potions favored by Dutch Bros are popular with the ‘young women in big cars’ demographic on TikTok, the energy drink market is saturated enough that many different brands appeal to niche consumer groups.
This week, in my ongoing quest to find my body’s proper balance of guarana, taurine, and ginseng, I’m looking into an energy drink brand that’s cornered a decidedly different sector of the creator market. So strap yourself into your comfiest chair, make sure your headset is working properly, and log on with me as we investigate…
If you’re not a gamer, or a big fan of energy drinks in general, you might have never heard of this week’s spotlightee. But if you’re active in the creator marketing industry—and given that you’re reading this newsletter, I think that might be the case—you owe it to yourself to learn more about the work that Gamer Supps is doing.
Let this description from the brand’s About Us page speak for itself:
Sorry, what?
They’re an energy drink brand catering to people who like video games. That is what Gamer Supps does.
And they do it well! I’m not trying to knock the brand just because their copywriter went crazy with the thesaurus. Besides, in addition to this write-up, Gamer Supps also has one of the coolest features I’ve seen on a brand’s website: a partnerships page that demonstrates Gamer Supps’ expert-level understanding of creator marketing.
You truly couldn’t write a better four-sentence summation of a winning creator partnership policy. All the main points about strong creator partnerships are there:
What follows from there is a form in which creators fill out their channel and follower count details, as well as their future content plans, alongside an FAQ handling topics like affiliate programs (Gamer Supps has the equivalent of one) and minimum follower counts (Gamer Supps does not have the equivalent of one).
It’s clear that Gamer Supps prides itself on strong creator relationships, and recognizes the value that those relationships can bring for social-first brands. So what have those creators done for Gamer Supps in return?
Gamer Supps Creator Count, 2020 - 2025
How about a 19x increase in total population from 2020 to 2025? Not too shabby, but if you think that’s something, just wait for some of the other growth numbers we’re going to see for Gamer Supps…
Gamer Supps Post Count, 2020 - 2025
…Numbers like Gamer Supps’ increase in post count, which saw an incredible 54x surge. To put that in perspective: in 2020, Gamer Supps earned 396 mentions from creators. In 2025? 21.4k. In just six years, the brand’s total content volume became its rounding error.
Also, it’s worth noting just how few creators managed to spark this turnaround: at 463 creators in 2025, this is a pretty exclusive, tight-knit community we’re talking about. It’s also a prolific one: 21.4k posts from 463 creators means that those creators were averaging 46 posts each.
You’d be hard pressed to find a brand with a post-per-creator average that high. Further proof that it pays to have a partnerships section on your website!
Gamer Supps EMV, 2020 - 2025
Now the growth starts to get even crazier. Yes, there is a bar on the graph for 2020, when Gamer Supps netted $3.2M EMV. By the time 2025 ended, the brand had posted an annual total of $424.9M EMV—a 134x improvement. Given that Earned Media Value (EMV) reflects virality and buzz across social media conversations, it’s safe to say that Gamer Supps started turning some heads online.
Gamer Supps Impressions, 2020 - 2025
Here’s another reason why it’s safe to say that: the brand going from 23.6M impressions in 2020 (not zero, as it would appear) to 7B on the dot in 2025. For those keeping score at home, that’s a 297x improvement.
Gamer Supps asked creators to get them in front of more eyes on social media, and boy did creators deliver.
Gamer Supps Engagements, 2020 - 2025
And it wasn’t just a matter of more people seeing content about Gamer Supps: it was a matter of more people engaging with that content—meaning that content managed to resonate with its intended audiences.
This one was ‘only’ a 203x improvement from 2020 (924.3k) to 2025 (187.5M). But in a climate where we’re seeing many top brands lose engagement from 2024 to 2025, Gamer Supps just kept climbing higher and higher.
And where did all this momentum come from? Sometimes this is a complicated question to answer. This is not one of those times.
Gamer Supps Share of Impressions by Platform, 2025
I think YouTube played an important role here. Not positive, just a hunch. Maybe Gamer Supps’ engagements came from somewhere else?
Gamer Supps Share of Engagements by Platform, 2025
Nope, okay, that’s overwhelmingly YouTube also. Go figure.
I almost never see a single channel being so responsible for a brand’s content and associated metrics, but given how YouTube corners the market on gaming content (disclaimer: we don’t track Twitch…yet), it makes sense. All the more reason why Gamer Supps, being the savvy creator marketers they are, specified on their website questionnaire that creators can still partner with them even if they’re mainly active on Instagram and TikTok.
Just going off the numbers, I don’t know whether any creators took them up on that, but hey, at least they offered.
Who Are Gamer Supps’ Creators?
So who are the YouTubers fueling this incredible groundswell for Gamer Supps? And what does their content look like?
Well, as you might have guessed, Gamer Supps’ top creators from an earned media standpoint tend to be, uh, gamers. Some of them have been with the brand for a while, but a notable contingent were fresh to the Gamer Supps community in 2025. This incoming cohort included DarkViperAU, who inspired $50.3M EMV via a whopping 1.5k posts—roughly four per day!
But the beauty of Gamer Supps is that despite the name, it’s not just for gamers. After all, like any contemporary social media audience, gamers tend to spread their attention across other interrelated genres. That’s how powerhouse YouTuber Caleb Hammer, who specializes in financial and geopolitical content, emerged as one of the brand’s top EMV-drivers in 2025. After not mentioning Gamer Supps in 2024, Caleb generated $32.5M EMV via 333 mentions.
Beyond any individual genre, Gamer Supps is building an archetype, reflecting the brand’s pitch-perfect understanding of its target audience. Because while content from these creators might not always mention Gamer Supps in great detail, typically plugging discount codes and signature flavors in the description text of each video, the broader creator population is a perfect representation of Gamer Supps’ ideal consumer: extremely online, into gaming, but also deeply embedded in YouTube culture itself.
It’s as fitting a synthesis of creator strategy and brand identity as I’ve ever seen—and as effective an example as any of how powerful that synthesis can be when it’s done right.
So really I only have one question: how does this stuff taste?
Okay, one more question: does Gamer Supps accept newsletters as their creator partners’ sole social channel? Asking for a friend…
*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.
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