YouTube Rolls Out New Sports Categories via Select

YouTube rolls out new sports categories via Select, providing advertisers with more targeted options to reach fans across major sporting events.

YouTube is enhancing its advertising features with two new “YouTube Select” sports-focused lineups as part of its leading premium YouTube Select program. It provides advertisers with new opportunities to integrate their promotions into popular sports content on the platform.

YouTube Select Overview

YouTube Select line-ups offer guaranteed ad inventories alongside a curated collection of popular YouTube channels, organized by subject. This enables advertisers to reach and expand their audiences by targeting comprehensive content lineups, rather than separate events, keywords, or channels.

You can find established lineups in niches such as beauty, fashion, lifestyle, food, recipes, and gaming. These additions provide more ways to connect to college sports fans and women’s live sports fans.

New Sports Lineups Introduced

YouTube is adding two more sports offerings to its Select lineup:

• College Sports Lineup: Perfect for passionate audiences of men’s college football and basketball, it features live games on YouTube TV, as well as video-on-demand (VOD) content on YouTube.
• YouTube TV Women’s Live Sports Lineup: Capitalizes on the rising interest in women’s sports with 100% live game content, featuring event-driven coverage of collegiate and pro sports.

The new sports placements target CTV (Connected TV) viewers, which sits between digital streaming live sports and traditional TV sports viewing.

Sports fans are at the center of live events, and advertisers have the ability to target them as if through conventional TV ad buys, but with the precision of digital media on YouTube.

YouTube’s Growing Sports Engagement

The aforementioned game opened the 2025-26 NFL season and was just recently streamed on YouTube, further emphasizing the platform’s emerging profile as a home for sporting events. Users reportedly spend more than 40 billion hours annually on the platform in sports content.

YouTube notes:

“These Lineups allow advertisers to effectively capture attention during thrilling moments, reach the right fans at the right time, and drive measurable results.”

The inclusion of these sports-specific YouTube Select options provides brands with additional premium, high-engagement inventory to reach passionate fanbases. This is a well-timed utility that capitalizes on the unlimited reach of sports and a rapidly changing viewership pattern on digital platforms.

Bottom Line

Advertisers interested in participating can contact their Google representative to inquire about YouTube Select reservations and access these exclusive sports marketing opportunities.