State of the Pitch 2026

How brands take pitches

The route is the first thing a creator needs, and the thing nobody counts. Across all 571 checked brands, the largest single route is affiliate network listing at 48.2% of the catalog. 275 brands (48.2%) are reached through a network listing rather than a page of the brand's own, and 208 brands (36.4%) take applications on their own program page, where a creator can read the terms and apply directly.

The beachhead: food, kitchen, and home

BravoDM's first creators are home and kitchen creators, and the shelves they pitch most are Food, Kitchen, and Home. Together those three categories hold 114 checked brands, 99 of them pitch-ready: a share of 86.8%, above the catalog-wide 83.0%. On these shelves the network listing is the main door: 50.9% of their brands are reached through one, against 48.2% across the catalog, and 32.5% run their own program page.

How those 114 brands take pitches, by route:

• 37own program page (32.5% of the three shelves)
• 13published email address (11.4% of the three shelves)
• 58affiliate network listing (50.9% of the three shelves)
• 6no public route found (5.3% of the three shelves)

Method: a census, not a survey

State of the Pitch is a census of the brands in BravoDM's catalog, not a sample and not a survey. Every brand in the catalog runs a creator program it publishes itself. BravoDM read each program where the brand publishes it, on the brand's own pages or in its network listing, before the brand entered the catalog, and recorded the application route, the program facts, and the date checked. Programs are re-checked on a rolling cycle; the figures on this page were verified through October 2026 and are computed from the catalog itself, from the same records the brands directory prints, so the report and the directory cannot drift apart.

Pitch-ready is a stricter bar than checked: the brand is active in the catalog, its sells line is verified, and its program images are verified. 474 brands clear it today. The other 97 are in the catalog and still being checked; a brand joins the pitch-ready set when its facts pass that bar, and leaves it if a re-check downgrades them. A route label describes where the application happens, not how generous a program is.

What this report does not claim: prices. It counts programs and routes, and BravoDM does not see completed deals, so it cannot publish observed market rates and none appear here. Where BravoDM does publish figures for what to charge (the pricing calculator and the rates pages), those numbers are outputs of BravoDM's pricing model and are labeled model estimates on those pages; they are not measurements of what any brand paid.

One limit to keep with the numbers: the catalog is a checked set, not every brand running a program. A brand enters when its program passes verification, and the counts move as programs are re-checked, so cite the page, not a screenshot.

Cite this report, or take the figures

The figures on this page, as a CSV download: counts and shares only, the same numbers the tables print. Download the State of the Pitch 2026 CSV. The count behind the report is the Creator Program Index, and the brands themselves are in the brands directory, one page per pitch-ready brand.