How Raid: Shadow Legends Became YouTube’s Most Famous Sponsor

How much did Raid: Shadow Legends spend on YouTubers?

A lot, spread very wide. The best public snapshot comes from creator analytics firm BuzzGuru, which tracked Raid’s YouTube sponsorships over six months in the second half of 2021. (Game World Observer)

These are third-party estimates for one six-month window, not Plarium’s own figures. But they show the strategy clearly: lots of mid-to-large gaming creators, mostly one video each, nearly all on YouTube.

That last row is the interesting one. More than two-thirds of creators did a single video. Raid wasn’t building a few long partnerships. It was buying reach across as many different audiences as possible.

Buying hundreds of one-off integrations is a huge operational job: outreach, contracts, scripts, approvals and payments for every channel. INFLUENCE handles that at scale, so you can run a broad, many-creator campaign without building a team the size of Plarium’s to manage it.

Why did Raid work with so many creators?

Because breadth is how you reach people who’d never search for your game. A mobile RPG isn’t something most people go looking for. Raid went to where people already were: gaming channels, yes, but also history, science, comedy and commentary channels.

There’s a numbers reason too. Mobile RPGs make money from a small share of players who stick around and spend. So the game needs a lot of installs to find those players. Hundreds of creators, each with a different audience, is a way to fish in a lot of ponds at once.

That’s close to what we call campaign composition at INFLUENCE: no single creator is a sure thing, but a portfolio of many creators across different audiences tends to give a much more predictable total result.

The catch is the last row in that table: many creators means a lot of work. INFLUENCE takes on that work, picking, contracting, briefing and paying every creator in the portfolio, and keeps the whole campaign within the max CPM and budget cap you set.

How did the Raid sponsorship become a meme?

Repetition, plus creators who were allowed to have fun with it. When the same sponsor turns up across so many channels, viewers notice. “This video is sponsored by Raid: Shadow Legends” became something people expected, then joked about, then quoted back at creators.

Many creators leaned into it. They teased the sponsor, made skits about it or acknowledged that everyone knew it was coming. And because the jokes were usually affectionate, the brand got even more attention, including in videos it never paid for.

What made it work:

• Frequency. You can only become a meme if people see you over and over.

• Creator freedom. Self-aware, joking reads felt native to each channel instead of like an interruption.

• A clear call to action. Under the jokes, viewers almost always got a link and a starter bonus to try the game.

Letting creators joke about you takes trust, and a brief that sets clear limits without killing the fun. INFLUENCE writes each creator a brief in their own voice, with your must-haves and disclosure built in, and you approve every draft before it goes live.

Is “becoming a meme” good for your brand?

It depends on what you’re selling and how much you’re spending. For Raid, fame was the point. For most games, being a punchline has real downsides.

The bigger lesson isn’t “become a meme.” It’s that creator reads work better when they sound like the creator, not like your ad copy. Raid’s most memorable integrations were the ones creators made their own.

There’s also a cost question. Raid’s effective CPM in BuzzGuru’s data was about $19.55. That’s a premium price for attention, more than U.S. Meta ad benchmarks in early 2026, which averaged roughly $9 to $14 for reach campaigns. (Affect Group) It made sense for a game that earns a lot from each paying player. It might not for yours.

Working out whether a CPM makes sense for your game is easier when every creator is priced the same way. INFLUENCE prices on delivered views, so you can compare what you’re paying per 1,000 views with your other channels. Try our gaming creator CPM calculator to sanity-check your own numbers.

What should you copy from Raid, and what should you skip?

Copy the structure, skip the saturation.

Worth copying:

• Go broad. Many creators across different audiences, not one big name.

• Look beyond gaming channels. Raid’s reads on history, science and comedy channels reached people who’d never see a gaming ad.

• Give a reason to act now. A starter bonus or reward code turns curiosity into an install.

• Let creators be themselves. Self-aware, funny reads beat scripted ones.

Worth skipping:

• Saturating to the point of parody, unless you have the budget and the business model for it.

• One-off deals only. Raid’s data shows mostly single videos. For many games, bringing back creators who performed well is a better use of money.

• Short reads with no gameplay. A 60-second talking-head read is cheap to make, but showing the game usually sells it better.

Rebooking your best creators and testing new ones each wave is how a broad campaign gets better over time. INFLUENCE keeps track of how each creator’s videos performed and builds the next wave around what worked, so you’re not starting from scratch each time. For more on mobile games specifically, see influencer marketing for mobile games.

Raid: Shadow Legends turned creator sponsorships into something close to a media buy: many channels, consistent spending and a clear call to action. The meme was a side effect. You probably don’t want to become a punchline, but the structure underneath, a broad portfolio of creators priced and managed like media, is worth copying. That’s exactly the kind of campaign INFLUENCE was built to run.