What the Ad Reads Bought
Two companies bought the same kind of attention on YouTube. One grew while spending a smaller share each year. The other spent more than half its revenue on advertising and lost customers.
If you run a consumer business, someone has told you to buy creator ad reads, and someone else has told you they are a waste of money. A popular video by the YouTuber Micro recently made the second case well: the sponsors you hear on YouTube are often young companies spending investors' money to buy attention fast, and the audience carries the risk.
I wanted to know which side the evidence is on. The answer turned out to be neither, and the reason is the useful part.
The test, written down first
I took six brands known for heavy YouTube sponsorship and paired each with a rival in the same category that mostly buys its attention elsewhere: Raycon and Bose, BetterHelp and Talkspace, Manscaped and Gillette, Squarespace and GoDaddy, NordVPN and Norton, and Raid: Shadow Legends and Candy Crush.
Before pulling any data, I wrote down the test. For each brand, how much of its best year of search demand does it still have? If the sponsors kept at least 20 points less than their rivals in four or more of the six pairs, the claim that ad reads don't build lasting demand would hold. At two or fewer, it would fail. In between, the answer would be that the data can't say.
Then I measured it three ways. Each one is a reasonable way to count search interest. They differ in the source and the start date.
| How it was measured | Pairs supporting | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Google Trends, September 2021 onward | 3 of 6 | Can't say |
| Google Ads search volume, 2019 onward | 3 of 5 | Can't say |
| Google Ads search volume, 2021 onward | 2 of 5 | Claim fails |
Retention is the latest 12 months of search interest as a share of the best 12 months in the window. BetterHelp is left out of the Google Ads rows because Google withholds search volume for mental-health terms. Google Trends exports, US, pulled September 26, 2026; Google Ads volume via DataForSEO Labs, pulled the same day.
The verdict depends on where you look. On Google Trends, NordVPN is still at its peak. On Google Ads data over the same months, it is down 43 percent. Three of the six pairs change sides from one view to the next, and on the strictest view the claim fails outright.
Only one brand told the same story every time. Squarespace kept its demand.
So search data can't tell a founder whether ad reads work. It can tell you that anyone who sounds certain about it probably picked one source and one start date, and stopped there.
The money
Search interest is attention. A business runs on customers, and customers show up in the accounts. So I went to the annual filings, where there were any. Four of the six sponsors are private or file outside the United States. Two are worth reading closely, because their filings say what they spent and what it bought.
BetterHelp's advertising and marketing as a share of its revenue in 2024: $558.8 million spent, $1,040.7 million earned. Revenue fell 8 percent that year, and average paying users fell 11 percent.
BetterHelp, owned by Teladoc Health, raised its advertising and marketing 3 percent in 2024 while its revenue and its customers both fell. More than half of every dollar it earned went back into advertising. In 2025 its revenue fell another 9 percent, to $950.4 million, and the segment's adjusted earnings fell 46 percent. Teladoc's filing says plainly that reaching paying users through advertising channels remains critical to its success.
Squarespace went the other way. Between 2021 and 2023, its last full year as a public company, revenue grew from $784 million to $1,012 million. Its advertising went from about 35 percent of revenue to about 25 percent. It spent fewer dollars on advertising in 2023 than in 2021, and still grew by more than a quarter.
| Company | Advertising ÷ revenue | What revenue did |
|---|---|---|
| BetterHelp (heavy sponsor) | 48% (2023) → 54% (2024) | −8% in 2024, −9% in 2025 |
| Talkspace (its rival) | About 13% (2025) | +91% from 2022 to 2025; three quarters now paid by insurers |
| Squarespace (heavy sponsor) | 35% (2021) → 25% (2023) | +29% from 2021 to 2023 |
| GoDaddy (its rival) | About 5.5% (2025) | +21% from 2022 to 2025 |
Form 10-K filings via SEC EDGAR. BetterHelp figures are Teladoc's segment disclosures; its 2023 figures are derived from the 2024 filing's year-on-year changes, and its 2025 revenue is from Teladoc's full-year results release. Squarespace's figures are from its last annual filings before it went private in 2024. Advertising is each company's own reported line and is not defined identically across them.
GoDaddy spends about 5.5 percent of revenue on advertising. Norton's parent, Gen Digital, spends about 12 percent, though its latest growth includes an acquisition, so it says little on its own.
The rival that changed who pays
The most useful comparison is BetterHelp against Talkspace, because they sell almost exactly the same thing: therapy on your phone. Talkspace spent about 13 percent of its 2025 revenue on advertising, a fifth less in dollars than in 2022, while its revenue nearly doubled over the same years.
It didn't get there by out-advertising BetterHelp. It changed who pays. In 2025, Talkspace's revenue from health plans paying for their members' sessions grew 38 percent, to $171.5 million, three quarters of the company. Its own cash-pay business, the one that looks most like BetterHelp's, shrank 30 percent on purpose; its annual report calls that an intentional decision to focus marketing on insured members. Net income rose from $1.1 million to $7.8 million.
That route has a price. Insurers pay less per session than someone paying full price, and Talkspace's gross margin slipped as the mix shifted. It also takes contracts with each health plan, therapists who can bill them, and patience. None of that can be bought in a week. BetterHelp began accepting insurance in 2025, and by mid-2026 Teladoc was telling investors that cash-pay revenue was falling faster than insurance revenue could replace it.
The full BetterHelp and Talkspace story is on Sound Decisions.
Your call: will BetterHelp's 2026 revenue beat, meet or miss Teladoc's own lowered forecast? Make your prediction. Voting closes October 21.
What separates them
Squarespace, BetterHelp and Talkspace all bought attention. What they did with it was different, and it comes down to two routes.
My reading, and it is a reading rather than a measurement: either the customers you buy stay, or someone else brings them to you. Squarespace looks like the first. A website is hard to move once it is built, so each customer bought keeps paying, advertising compounds, and the share of revenue it needs can fall. Talkspace is the second. A health plan with its own reason to send members does much of the finding, so the ad budget can shrink while the business grows.
BetterHelp, in 2024, had neither working. A therapy subscription is easy to pause, and nearly every customer was one it paid to find. When that happens, each year starts close to zero and the bill rises just to stand still.
The filings show the spending and the outcomes. They do not prove the cause. None of these companies publishes retention in a form that would settle it, and I would want to see that before saying more.
For scale, creator ad reads are priced at roughly $10 to $50 per thousand views, depending on the niche, according to 2026 creator rate surveys. That is an estimate, and the price is not really the question. What each dollar brings back is.
- You sell a subscription or a repeat purchase, so a customer won today is worth more if they are still there next year.
- You are weighing creator reads against other paid channels and can measure new paying customers month by month.
- Advertising is already a large share of your revenue, above about a fifth, where the trend in that share matters more than any single campaign.
- Someone else already has your customer, an insurer, employer, platform or adviser, and you haven't yet asked what it would take for them to send people your way.
- Not yours if you sell a one-time purchase with no repeat, or you are pre-revenue and buying awareness for a launch, where retention can't be measured yet.
Track advertising as a share of revenue, paying customers, and cost per new customer every quarter, and write your stop rule down before you spend.
Put three numbers on one line each quarter: what you spent on advertising divided by revenue, how many paying customers you have, and what you spent to win each new one. Before you sign the next creator deal, write the rule that ends it: if the advertising share rises for two quarters in a row while paying customers fall, you stop and fix what happens after the sale before buying more attention. Next to the three numbers, write the name of one partner who already has your customer and a reason to send them to you: an insurer, an employer, a platform, an adviser. That is the second route, and it is worth one conversation before the next ad budget.
- What it costs
- Two hours a quarter to pull the numbers, one partner conversation, and the discipline to pause a channel that is still producing sign-ups. That last cost is the real one.
- How you'll know
- Within two quarters, your advertising share of revenue is flat or falling while paying customers grow. If the share is rising and customers are flat, you are renting attention, not building a business.
Related from Sound Decisions: Most of Your Budget Is Rent · The Flip Flop That Isn't
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