you’re sitting there, watching the brand-new caddicarus episode. you’re about 20 minutes into the 70-minute epic, you’ve already finished your bowl of popcorn, and you’re racking up reaction images and clips like it’s the lottery…

when suddenly, out of the blue-

it’s december, the most consumerist month of the year. christmas shoppers clog every store imaginable, buying everything in sight. so what better time of the year than now to discuss sponsor segments?

sponsor segments are sort of the way of life for just about every youtuber these days. whether they’re formally placed before or after the show proper, or placed in the middle with awkward segues, it’s hard to find a youtuber who hasn’t talked about raid shadow legends or nord VPN in any of their vids. with the adpocolypse back in 2017, youtubers began incorporating sponsors more than ever in their videos, as well as patreon plugs. since then, it’s become a necessity.

the caddicarus show and its channel’s side shows are no strangers to sponsors. in fact, the channel has had sponsored segments and videos ever since the old kingdom! (which is my placeholder name for 2012-late 2015 until i come up with an original name. i took an egyptology class this semester okay.)

in this entry, we’ll take a look into this channel’s history with sponsors, and how the segments have evolved over the years.

pre-2019

if you were around pre-2019, you may remember that sponsors didn’t use to be as entertaining as they are now! in 2015 we slowly began to see sponsored segments and videos make their way onto the channel. at first, we had mentions of appman during the end slate of the videos, then we had sponsored tinker time videos for the PS store, and then we had the announcement of caddy partnering with the pixel empire in july 2015! he didn’t have any of his merch on the site until 2016, though - this was back during the days of rodeo arcade and the yetee.do those sites even exist anymore…?

…okay, looks like the yetee’s still around…first thing i saw when i looked up rodeo arcade was a reddit thread about how bad it was. lmao.

with the pixel empire partnership, we began seeing dedicated sponsor segments at the beginning and/or end of videos. not EVERY video, but a whole lot. and with the introduction of outtakes in mid-late 2015, the endings of videos could get up to 3 minutes! it was a much different world back then compared to today’s straightforward “okay here’s the subscribe jingle and here’s the patreon credits with no voiceover and here’s stanley’s segment”.

as 2015 continued, we started seeing ads for crunchyroll and audible. i believe there were also ads for dollar shave club - i actually found about about these companies through caddicarus, and they would go on to become household names when it came to youtube sponsorships! i think i also found out about amino through caddy - it was either him or rebeltaxi. my memory is cloudy when it comes to the specifics of this stuff.

in 2016, gamesgrabr promos really ramped up, and chrono.gg - later nexus.gg - was introduced into the mix. the address “chrono dot gg forward slash caddy” was ingrained into the skull of many a beautiful person. there was also a sponsored current quickies about an AR game called kazooloo - and i never realized it was unlisted. it COMPLETELY slipped my mind when i was compiling privated/unlisted videos. what’s strange is that this and the 2017-19 sponsored videos were unlisted but not the 2015 sponsored tinker times.

caddy returned to patreon in 2016, so in a bunch of videos after that, that was like a sponsored segment.

2017 was a hotspot for separate sponsored videos - i touched on these briefly in my entry on the caddy show. you can find most of them in this playlist!

i remember the dreadnought video stuck out to me because there was this bit that 15-year-old me thought was really funny for some reason… it went something like “bada bing bada boom…! i was a bada man when i used my computer that doesn’t use the default web searcher as bing to make the bada ships go boom!”

that was the original screenshot i took of it in 2017…the file was titled “cursed image”

another sponsored vid i have fond memories of was the one on the acer predator laptop. i was on vacation in branson, missouri when it dropped, and i remember watching it while riding back to the hotel late at night as i looked at the view of the city from the mountains.

there was more of the same through the rest of the pre-2020 era. there were two more shady voucher app things which i think were the same people - “appbounty” and “apphunter”. there was this especially shady-sounding one literally called swagbucks. there were some videos sponsored by forhims, and let me tell you, opening a caddicarus episode and being greeted by caddy talking about men’s pubic hair and sexual wellness and it not being a bit was like a digital punch in the face

he was also one of the many youtubers who sponsored betterhelp in 2018, and if you know the drama behind that company…yeaaaahhhh. but he took the sponsor in good faith and pulled out when shit hit the fan.

none of these sponsors were particularly controversial. there were the usual “sellout” comments, and many eyebrows were raised at sponsors like swagbucks and forhims, but most fans didn’t mind these segments. the only genuinely controversial one was the PUBG video from 2019, which had a nearly 50/50 like/dislike ratio and a divided comment section. and…it really was such a weird video. like, it felt like an AI watched some caddicarus videos and was made to produce a sponsored caddicarus video about PUBG mobile. it felt very dishonest, very uncanny, and it’s just…you know those mobile game ads that show some kind of influencer playing the game? like the ones seen on the vinesauce android games segments? yeah the caddicarus PUBG video was one step away from being classified as that. we just needed a video of him in the corner playing the game.

 

season 13 onwards

with the premiere of season 13 in august 2019, sponsor segments at the beginning/end of the show were taken away entirely in favor of awkward segues in the middle of the video, a tactic that was starting to become popular in the youtube sphere. if viewers know for sure the beginning/end of the video will be sponsored, then they’ll know to skip! so how about we just put it in the middle of the video?? that’ll surprise them!

and…viewers still skip them! as this tactic increased in popularity, we as viewers have been conditioned to start tapping that screen or spamming the right arrow key when we hear a youtuber start to emphasize online security or website building in the middle of their 4-hour essay about an obscure cartoon that ended years ago.

so how does jim combat this? well, he simply makes his sponsored segments entertaining to watch. much like emplemon and internet historian, caddicarus sponsored segments from the final season of the original series and beyond are known for their entertainment value.

the spons character we know and love today is a combination of two characters. one is the unnamed kite demon who first appeared in the pixar games video. the other is the actual named character spons who was first introduced in the lego games video, and he wasn’t a kite - it was literally just jim. the lovable shill kite as we know him appeared in the kinect games video, and it’s been that way ever since. and he’s now legally bound to the channel!

also i have to show y'all this tweet that’s an absolute gem.

i hope you enjoyed this look into how sponsors were done on the caddicarus channel!