How to Evaluate Youtube Influencers for Influencer Marketing

YouTube is valuable both as a general traffic source and for attracting lasting customers. However, paying for the promotional services of influencers can be costly, with the price demanded occasionally exceeding tens of thousands of dollars.

Unsurprisingly, there is a big scammer culture surrounding influencer marketing. One typical scammer tactic — pretending to be a famous influencer and contacting you with great offers for their services. You should always make sure to double check if you’re communicating with the actual influencer, rather than an impersonator. Another tactic, which is the topic of this article, is fake traffic — people, through the use of various services, often amass big numbers of subscribers or followers, which most often are not actual people, but bots. Making sure your message reaches the right people is crucial, so always be sure to research the channels to make sure they are legitimate.

Examine the Average Enagement Ratios of The Youtube Influencer’s Channel:

• Comments to Views — the average ratio of comments:views is about 0.5–1%. So a video that has generated 1000 views, should have around 10 comments
• Views to Subscribers — around 15–20% is the average amount of views a youtube channel gets from their subscribers

To give an example pay attention to the subscriber and views amount

So if a video has lots of views but no comments or if a channel has lots of subscribers but no views, most likely it is fake.

Tools to analyse a YouTube Influencer’s channel:

Are you already suspicious that the Youtuber you found could be buying his/her subscribers, views or comments? Use the following tools to either confirm or resolve your suspicions:

Socialblade — a great tool which can provide a good amount of insight and analytics

Note: Look for patterns in behaviour and see if you can find something “strange” in them:

Look for ‘out of the ordinary’ spikes in data graphs that would point to non-organic growth

Youtube Studio — This one is more for the channel managers themselves, but you can point to it when asking to provide important data like age demographics

Note: Always take the data provided with a grain of salt, especially if in the screenshot you can’t verify which channel the data is from

Youtube Influencer pricing

As mentioned at the start, the price for a video can vary extensively, but it’s most likely proportional to the amount of subscribers a channel has. It is also likely to vary from industry to industry. Doing some research on specifics is absolutely necessary. To make sure that an influencer isn’t asking too much, you can try to contact multiple ones with similar followings and see what quotes they give you.

Here’s a concrete example in terms of price when it comes to crypto YouTubers. Generally you should be expecting a fee of around 5000 USD per video, and that’s the lower range of prices, so don’t be surprised if bigger channels ask for 2–3 times more. This is also a good example of the volatility of those prices, since in the crypto world, the ROI per video is closely linked with how healthy the environment is — when the market falls, so does the potential ROI of Influencer promotion, and, in turn, so do the prices per video!

To put it simply, look around, gather as much information as you can and be diligent in your research, so as not to get scammed!

Let us help you:

Scandiweb has plentiful experience with all sorts of influencer marketing. If you have any questions or are looking for someone to develop and realize your marketing strategy, get in touch at [email protected] or learn more about our influencer marketing services here!

Related articles:

• The Basics of Influencer marketing — What, How, Why?
• Social Commerce and You: Guide for Facebook and Instagram

Share on: