The changing face of the Creator Economy
Creators are no longer driven solely by the desire to create content.
Content creation has proved itself a lucrative career path, and creators are arming themselves with all necessary skills and resources to stay relevant.
The social media boom has completely redefined the creator ecosystem. What was being governed in the past by a handful of influencers and celebrities, is now being shaped by the rising creator middle class that is ready to experiment outside the traditional social platforms and monetization models.
This brings a fresh set of challenges for influencer marketing platforms since they have been the trusted gateway between brands and creators.
- A rising need to target and profile micro-influencers who were earlier not targeted. Brands are no longer interested in just the top 2% of creators, but also in deploying campaigns with the long-tail of middle-class creators. These creators are more relatable with their content, and help brands build deeper connections with their consumers.
- Tracking multiple platforms for creator content. Creators are not only engaging with their fans on YouTube and Instagram but on many more platforms - TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Discord, Snapchat, Udemy, Shopify, Patreon, OnlyFans, etc.
- The sheer volume of growing creators (~200M amateurs - source)
- Increase in content formats from images and videos to disappearing posts and short videos.
Changing data needs for Influencer Marketing platforms
The above shifting dynamic can mean a lot for influencer marketing platforms, especially as their customers see them as a trusted source of creator’s information.
But here are some newer challenges that have been emerging for them:
Verifying creator’s identity: With millions of creators showing interest in campaigns, Influencer Marketing platforms should be able to verify that the creator is who they say they are.
Providing authentic data to brands: Getting true and trustworthy data on creators is critical as campaign selection criteria, success parameters, and creator payments rely on it. With a surge in the number of creators and their distribution across newer channels, getting this data has become extremely difficult.
Third-party data agencies and data scrappers have failed influencer marketing platforms time and again:
- They are unreliable as many underlying platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, etc. discourage scrapping. Hence high chance that the data quality is irregular
- They provide only publicly visible data but not private information such as post impressions, which is an important metric for many brand engagement/ CPM calculations
- Leave the onus of creator verification to the influencer marketing platforms.
- Do not provide trusted audience demographics directly from the underlying platform as this data is private to the creator. Hence audience profiles are approximations and vary from one third-party provider to another for the same creator
- Data Authenticity can be the true moat for influencer marketing platforms. The more trusted the data, the lesser conflict with brands and creators, which will lead to the better players joining the platform and attracting more brands and creators respectively. This can transition into true network effects.
Solving the data problem for influencer marketing platforms
At Phyllo, we solve this problem for influencer marketing platforms by providing them with the simplest way to get trusted creator data:
- One API across multiple creator platforms
- Almost all the data comes from platform APIs
- Consent-driven and hence access to private data
Solving for data authenticity
Using Phyllo, developers can get access to creators' and independent workers' consented data directly from source platforms (e.g. YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, Shopify, Upwork, and more). We work with these platforms and not against them to ensure the data is trustable.
Solving for creator identity
We use the native platform apps that ask for a native platform login from the creator. This ensures that anybody who shares their data knows what they are sharing and there is an automatic verification of the source of data.
Solving for coverage
We cover every leading platform where creators engage their audience including Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Discord, Twitch, YouTube, etc.
We provide various API products to simplify the data needs:
- Identity: Identity API verifies a user's identity and returns unique identifier information about the creator such as name, email id, etc. depending upon the source platform.
- Engagement: Engagement API gives you data about content created by a creator and the reputation of a creator from the source platform (e.g. subscribers, followers, etc.)
- Audience: Audience APIs provide information about their audience’s demographics (age-gender pairs, interests, state/country, etc.)
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