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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🐧 First steps into the world of influencer marketing.

🐣 The first influencer collab with FIFA and FIFA fans.

🤹‍♀️ Understanding the commercial viability of being a creator on YouTube.

🎾 How naivety can take you far in marketing.

☄️ What takes an influencer from the first few followers to the first million.

🐾 Passion for content apart from consistency is what helps influencers grow.

🥀 It’s important to be honest with your audience.

🩰 Create content based on feedback or by “reading your audience”

🧝‍♂️ Testing one theme of content over another

💄 How influencers decide whether to produce content for multiple platforms or just one? 

🧤 What point in time does a new platform become viable for a marketer?

🧶 Expanding to other channels by reading your audience.

🎩 Some common elements that make a video work.

🪴How do advertisers vet influencers?

🎢 Platforms are open to the open source nature of content creation that the influencer economy symbolizes.

🛰 How tools for influencer marketing are evolving.

👠 All about the adpocalypse

💼 How does demonetization on YouTube work?

KEY QUOTES

Stumbling on early FIFA influencers

Adam: While doing work for our soccer app, I was actually running our Twitter campaigns and noticed that our best-performing Twitter campaigns were these FIFA-related accounts. I didn’t really have any idea what they were at the time, but as I kind of dug into them, I was like, “Oh, these are people who are posting videos of FIFA on YouTube”. 

That’s literally the language I was thinking of at the time, and I was really naive. I was very new to the world of user acquisition and marketing in general. I thought, “Oh, well I’ll reach out to them and see if they want to talk about Topps”.

It was just kind of perfect timing. That was a perfect product for YouTube at the time, and for these FIFA influencers, it just kind of took off from there. We grew our DAU 10x over the course of maybe four months with CPAs that were literally a magnitude lower.

Again, it was a perfect time, the perfect product, the perfect market. For a lot of these influencers, I was their first sponsor. It’s really what kicked it off.

Understanding the monetizing capacity of YouTube

Sophia: So after my sixth video upload—three, four months into being on YouTube, I was offered the YouTube partner program. I was like, what? You can get paid on YouTube, and I was underage for the YouTube partner program but we put it under my brother’s name.

I was getting paid through my brother. I would get updates from my brother on how much I’m making each month. Then after a few years of uploading, I got a sponsorship offer from Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts and they paid me significantly and I thought, “Whoa, this is actually something that could be a career.”

Naiveness can take you far

Adam: I credit it mostly to being naive. I think a certain level of naiveness really can take you far. 

How do videos get popular on YouTube

Sophia: It’s just the YouTube algorithms, they pick up this particular channel, upload time, and day. And so they can boost it into their YouTube algorithms and make it more searchable as well.

Growing into other channels

Sophia: We started the channel, very broad, top-down cars or something. Then we went into shocking things. And a lot more people would be wanting to watch more shocking things instead of just boring cars.

Because our audience is more 18 to 34. So we had people who researched the YouTube algorithm to see what our audience is looking for in our channel and what they like. So they like our hosts, Danny, Rebecca and Landon. They fell in love with them.

Then when they talked about the dumbest tweets or scary stuff, that’s when we found out that there are a lot of people on the channel and our subscribers would want to watch that stuff.

How to sign off on the right influencers

Adam: This isn’t something where it’s like, “Oh, okay, let me test a small ad campaign here, this ad campaign here”, and then you can compare click-through rates and install rates et cetera. It’s difficult. I would say this is what you need to step back a bit, and really think about who your customer is and who are the viewers of a video.

How do things change for an advertiser

Adam: So I think the platforms have recognized that “Hey, by using advertisers to sponsor influencers on our platform, we’re just increasing the quality of content on our platform”. I think that has outweighed maybe a small negative effect on traditional advertising. I should say, for an advertiser like me, it’s really not an either-or decision. I work mostly with mobile apps, so I run my Google UAC ads.

I run my YouTube ads, I run my Instagram ads, I run my Facebook ads, I do all these things anyways. Alongside my influencer marketing. So it’s not like it’s an either or a thing. It’s certainly not a zero-sum.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Shamanth

I’m very excited to welcome Sophia Yeh and Adam Hadi.

Sophia

Thank you for having me.

Adam

Thank you very much, Shamanth.

Shamanth

You both have had very interesting and unexpected paths to where you are now. Before we jump into the wonderful world of influencers that we’re gonna talk about, I would very much like to explore your paths.

Sophia, you started making YouTube videos when you were in the 10th grade. This was in 2007. What inspired you to do this?

Sophia

Back in high school, I was bullied and I didn’t really have many friends, so I would stay home and practice—beatboxing and music were my getaway from all the negativity, it’s what brought me up. So I was beatboxing and there was a talent show at my high school and I was practicing really hard for it, and my brother would be helping me on it. 

The day before, it got canceled. So I was pretty disappointed but my brother suggested that there’s this platform called YouTube to post videos.

So I recorded with poor quality, and then I just posted four different videos at the same time, and YouTube picked it up. And it went off into thousands then hundred thousand and then millions of views.

Shamanth

That must have been unexpected to somebody who was bullied, it must have been sweet revenge for you.

Sophia

Everybody at school didn’t believe I had talent and didn’t believe I would practice every single second of my life at school. They were so annoyed. I guess that practice paid off.

Shamanth

What was the path from that point when you posted your first videos on YouTube to what you do right now?

Sophia

I took a videography class in high school and making videos was basically my life back then. I went into filmmaking and media production in college, and then that’s what made me have this passion for YouTube.

Shamanth

So it sounds like YouTube opened up a path for you that you hadn’t quite anticipated or seen.

Adam, you had a very different path to the world of influencers and YouTube and all the cool stuff that we will dive into very soon. Tell us about what your path was to the world of influencer marketing.

Adam

I was doing user acquisition for Topps Digital. Topps Digital is the digital division of the Topps Company that they launched seven or eight years ago.

While doing work for our soccer app, I was actually running our Twitter campaigns and noticed that our best-performing Twitter campaigns were these FIFA-related accounts. I didn’t really have any idea what they were at the time, but as I kind of dug into them, I was like, “Oh, these are people who are posting videos of FIFA on YouTube”. 

That’s literally the language I was thinking of at the time, and I was really naive. I was very new to the world of user acquisition and marketing in general. I thought, “Oh, well I’ll reach out to them and see if they want to talk about Topps”.

It was just kind of perfect timing. That was a perfect product for YouTube at the time, and for these FIFA influencers, it just kind of took off from there. We grew our DAU 10x over the course of maybe four months with CPAs that were literally a magnitude lower.

Again, it was a perfect time, the perfect product, the perfect market. For a lot of these influencers, I was their first sponsor. It’s really what kicked it off.

Shamanth
Interesting. Until that point, as you said, you’d been managing user acquisition and prior to that, you were actually looking at economic data.

So what was your first impression when you saw all of these people who were posting FIFA videos on YouTube? What did you think when you first stumbled upon these guys?

Adam

I was very, very naive. I did not enter this world organically as a fan. 

The entire market was naive at that point. Influencer marketing wasn’t a term, outside of maybe, a couple of hardcore gaming companies. There weren’t really many sponsors on YouTube at the time. So for me, it was this combination where for the influencers it made a ton of sense because our app Topps Kick was new content for them.

These are people who are posting about FIFA every day, and they’re the stars of new content and so the FIFA app really provided that. They were willing to do these promotions at a really cost-effective rate because for them it was just good content. 

Obviously for us, there was this huge opportunity of a lower CAC, lower cost of acquisition, along with a really engaged and highly educated consumer coming in because they had a much stronger onboarding than they would’ve otherwise experienced via traditional advertising.

Shamanth

It just seemed like the perfect match marketing-wise, and it just seemed so seamless for the users and it wasn’t quite anything like the ads that they had seen in the past.

Adam

Yes. The economist in me loved that. There were a lot of surpluses to be had.

Shamanth

Excellent. 

So Sophia, when you made your first YouTube video in high school, YouTube was just two years old. And you continued to make videos through college, as you mentioned, and you make them even today.

At what point did you see that YouTube wasn’t just like a hobbyist platform, it wasn’t just like for the nerds to put up things that they were really passionate about, but it could actually be a commercial opportunity for yourself as well as for a lot of creators that they could actually make serious money with.

Was there a specific point where you saw, this actually is a commercial opportunity?

Sophia

So after my sixth video upload—three, four months into being on YouTube, I was offered the YouTube partner program. I was like, what? You can get paid on YouTube, and I was underage for the YouTube partner program but we put it under my brother’s name.

I was getting paid through my brother. I would get updates from my brother on how much I’m making each month. Then after a few years of uploading, I got a sponsorship offer from Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts and they paid me significantly and I thought, “Whoa, this is actually something that could be a career.”

Shamanth

You said, you saw the interest from the YouTube folks for your sixth video, which is relatively early on, I would say.

Did you get the sense that the YouTube guys recognized the potential of the platform as a huge commercial opportunity at the time?

Sophia

YouTube was hand-picking influencers to be part of the partner program. It was very early on, they just started the YouTube partner program where they would be paying people for putting ads in front of their videos.

Shamanth

So you were almost an early adopter of the YouTube program.

Sophia

I have YouTube to thank for all that because they tweeted my video and I freaked out when I was 16.

Shamanth

Yeah, I can imagine that it’s a good problem to have, but that can bring you an enormous amount of traffic. 

Adam, you were looking at a lot of the FIFA influencers at the time.

Was there a specific influencer that comes to mind, or was there a specific instance that comes to mind that you were like, “Oh, this is actually very cool and this could actually make sense?” 

Adam

Well, to be honest, it was literally the first one. It was so successful. I’m still working today with some of these influencers.

He’s a FIFA guy. I first sponsored him in 2015 maybe, and just sponsored him maybe a month or two ago. He’s somebody who evolved with the platform. His content used to be strictly FIFA first and as the platform evolved, he got broader and broader.

Shamanth

Interesting. And we’ll talk about how a lot of the influencers evolved further down the podcast, but it sounds like you and this guy and YouTube all helped each other grow over the last couple of years.

Adam

Yeah. I would specifically shout out KSI. KSI was the largest FIFA influencer at the time.

He was one of the first ones to say, “Hey, this could be much bigger than just FIFA”. In many ways, this could be much bigger than just YouTube. He’s come out with tons of music. He was in a boxing match. The guy’s got his own show. 

This guy and his crew, they’re called the Side Men, were visiting PAX GE in Boston.

Shamanth

What is that?

Adam

PAX is like a gaming conference. So this was kind of a gathering for a bunch of YouTubers, especially sports YouTubers at the time. I had hunted him down. I was stalking him essentially on Twitter to get in touch with him. Because I’d been able to reach a lot of other folks, but I hadn’t been able to reach him. I bought an iPad mini, downloaded Topps Kick, and loaded it there.

When I finally found him at the conference, I gave it to him and I remember him saying, “You got me a mini”. That got the guy’s attention and eventually we did go live with him. That’s where I started. 

Shamanth

You traveled all the way to Boston to track this guy down and make the deal work with him, which is also impressive because it sounds like you had just about stumbled upon and were figuring out influencer marketing yourself. But you really seem to have this conviction that made you just really chase these guys down.

Adam

I credit it mostly to being naive. I think a certain level of naiveness really can take you far. 

Shamanth

Absolutely. You were convinced at some level. 

Sophia just coming to you, a lot of influencers start off small. They start with a couple of tens of followers, maybe it’s their friends and family.

What takes an influencer from the first handful of followers that could be friends and family, to their first couple of hundred followers? What are the typical things that drive an influencer’s early growth?

Sophia

I think the main key is to be consistent because I learned it the hard way. I actually got way too busy with school in college, and then I took a break from YouTube for over a year.

Then my YouTube channel really died down after that. After I graduated, a high school friend reached out to me because he knew I was doing YouTube and he wanted to grow his own YouTube channel. 

I was looking for a job after college and the industry is really hard to get into, so he just offered me a job, and I agreed. Then I worked with him for about four years editing his videos, and he created a lot of different channels, including this amazing top 10, which now has 5.2 million subscribers. Now they are one of my clients for getting sponsorships.

Shamanth

It sounds like because these guys were posting consistently over time, they were able to grow.

Sophia

They were very consistent. I stopped being consistent and that’s how I died down.

Shamanth

When you say that somebody has to be consistent, how does that work on the YouTube platform? Let’s say you post a video every week. How does that result in more followers?

Sophia

It’s just the YouTube algorithms, they pick up this particular channel, upload time, and day. And so they can boost it into their YouTube algorithms and make it more searchable as well.

Shamanth

So consistency is a factor in the algorithms as well, and let’s say somebody’s gone from the early friends and family to getting a reasonable amount of followers. How does one go about going from a couple of hundred followers, posting relatively consistently to making this economically viable and making this a full-time thing for themselves? What has to happen to make that shift for an influencer?

Sophia

I think being very passionate about what you do on YouTube. Never be tired of what you do on YouTube and be very consistent. If you’re working and on YouTube at the same time, you won’t really have a social life. Take that time to work on yourself.

Shamanth

Got it. It can be very demanding as I can imagine because once you see videos, you’re like, “Oh, somebody just took a smartphone and spent five minutes”. But it clearly looks like there’s a lot of work that goes into just shooting a YouTube video.

But again, Adam, just switching over to you, you’ve seen and done deals with relatively small niche influencers that could perhaps charge a couple of hundred dollars a post, and you’ve also worked with some massive YouTubers and influencers, who could make a couple of hundreds of thousands of dollars per post.

You talked about the FIFA guy who just started from having a personal brand that was just around FIFA and football, to being a huge lifestyle brand. He was into music, he had a boxing match, and he had his own show. What do you think catalyzes that shift for a lot of influencers who do end up going big?

Adam

 I’ve worked with hundreds and hundreds of YouTubers. I should first say that I have zero subscribers of my own. So this is not first-hand advice, but what I see as per the themes across channels, influencers who are really eager to reinvest in their channel or who aren’t so focused on monetization from day one—those tend to do really well over time. Those who are honest with their audience, I think that is really important. If you’re building a dedicated audience over time, they’ll know right away. They’ll know when you’re being dishonest.

So you need to be genuine, and honest, reinvest in your channel, be humble, and ultimately put in the work. It’s not easy, the odds of making it to a million subscribers on YouTube are about the same as winning the lottery.

Shamanth

Let’s take the example of your FIFA guy. So he’s making videos about football. One day he’s like, “Guys, I’m gonna do this boxing match”. Is that not an abrupt transition for his followers? How does he sort of position it so as to seem authentic and honest to his followers?

Adam

If it did happen like that, it would be super abrupt. No, for him it was a very long change. This was gradual and over time. What’s important is that you get feedback from your audience. FIFA was just a gimmick. His audience really liked him and his personality.

The ones who were entirely dependent on FIFA, the game, really didn’t survive nearly as well. A lot of those channels have shrunk and a lot of them died over time because the interest is solely based on the game. But those whose interest was really in the personalities, those are the ones who are able to evolve.

And so I think if you’re properly reading your audience and listening to your audience, you can make those changes over time. 

Shamanth

Right. So it’s as much about who they are as a person, about their personal brand, as much as it is about FIFA or boxing or whatever they post about.

Adam

Every channel is different. If I’m into vlogging, that may be why I subscribe.

If I’m into Star Wars and that’s the only thing I care about, and the channel is all about Star Wars, then all of a sudden they start posting content on Star Trek. I might be like, “Hey, what the hell guys?” and unsubscribe. 

So there’s a balance to be found there.

Shamanth

Right. So you know yourself and you know your audience and you read your audience, but it sounds like that’s a broad process that these guys use.

Adam

It’s not something that I’m an expert in. It’s just these are things I’ve noticed.

Shamanth

Absolutely. And I think this also ties into what Sophia said, which was that these guys have to be passionate. Sophia, how excited you are about beatboxing totally comes across in your videos.

And I think that’s absolutely a key ingredient because if you’re passionate, the viewers are like, “Yeah, she’s cool”. So even if she goes from beatboxing to something relatively unrelated, I’m gonna follow along because she’s kind of cool and I’ll keep watching. I think that can certainly be the process that can happen.

Sophia

Sure I actually tried to test my audience to see if they were into just vlogging without beat-boxing, and they weren’t. But if I did beatboxing in my videos, they were all for that. 

Shamanth

How did you test this?

Sophia

I just posted like a vlog and then the click rate wasn’t very good and the people didn’t really stay very long on the video.

When I beatbox in my vlogs, they stayed. They were looking for the beatbox in the vlogs.

Shamanth

That ties into what Adam said, that you’re still reading your audience. You’re not just focusing on what you’re strong at, but you’re like, what do the people want? What do they think I’m good at?

Adam, I know you’ve seen a lot of genres and hundreds of influencers. Are there specific genres that you find resonate more with users and viewers than others? If indeed the success of a channel is genre-dependent?

Adam

I think it changes over time and is really based on trends.

What can be challenging is sustaining a trend after the trend is gone. In the last year, you’ve seen channels blow up almost overnight just based on Fortnite. All they do is post Fortnite content. However, if you can’t parlay that into something else, then you’re gonna live and die with Fortnite.

Fortnite is still extremely popular and that’s still a very sustainable way to manage a channel but inevitably that’s gonna go away. I think you can grow your channel on a trend and I think that’s fine, but eventually, you have to make it your own.

Shamanth

Sure, and you can certainly ride a wave. 

Speaking of which, Sophia, I’m curious, YouTube is certainly the first big influencer platform. You latched onto it, the guys you work with the Most Amazing Top 10, they are very much on YouTube.

Ever since YouTube started and ever since Most Amazing started off, other platforms have come into play—Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok—there are a bunch of them right now. There are also platforms like Vine, which came up but never really took off.

How do influencers decide whether to produce content for multiple platforms or just one? 

Sophia

I can’t speak for all influencers, but from my personal experience, I’ve tried every single platform to test which would go in a good direction. So Instagram is good for me, Facebook is good, and YouTube—they are all pretty good.

It actually depends on who is on the platform and why they follow you on the platform for. 

Shamanth

Can you elaborate?

Sophia

So for YouTube, they want to see videos. I beatbox and they want to see longer videos of me beatboxing. So, YouTube is a good platform for that.

I can also do videos on Instagram, but they are restricted to a minute. 

Shamanth

Got it. So you’re saying, does the format that is native to the platform resonate with the format that I’m good at? Beatboxing tends to be a relatively longer form, not like a ten-second clip. And therefore you’re like, YouTube can be my strongest channel so let’s just focus there. 

That ties into what both of you said earlier, in terms of knowing yourself and knowing the audience, and of course knowing the format that you’re putting out into the world.

Adam, from a marketer’s point of view, at what point in time does a new platform become viable for a marketer? When do you decide that Snapchat is actually coming up, it could be a good platform for me to invest in, or Vine’s kind of dying down, let’s just get out of there.

Adam

I think it really depends on where your audience is, almost as much as timing. If you have an older audience, above 35, your audience is not Snapchat, there’s really nothing you can do about that. Snapchat won’t be an effective channel for you. That’s either with influencer marketing or conventional paid ads.

So you really need to find where your audiences live. If you’re talking about gamers, which is going to be a much bigger deal for you? YouTube is very broad. 

I’ve talked to a lot of folks in the space who are trying to enter and hear about influencer marketing, and they’re like, “Oh, this is the next great thing”. You really need to find where those influencers are. If your target audience is 40 to 68-year-old females, they’re probably not on YouTube. You need to find where they are.

Shamanth

Absolutely. It sounds like you have to get the right audience, it doesn’t matter how big the audience is. But is there a certain critical mass of number of users at which a platform becomes viable to even look at or start exploring as an influencer platform?

Adam

I don’t know if there’s a specific number, but having sponsored people on Musical.ly 2-3 years ago, while it’s still a fairly small platform, I saw strong results. If the platform isn’t smaller than the product I’m advertising then there are enough people there to make it work.

Shamanth

How small was it at the time in terms of numbers? 

Adam

I think they were probably 25 to 50 million DAU. Obviously, that’s a large number, but not really compared to where they are now. Musical.ly obviously evolved into TikTok. They were the number one most downloaded app of 2018.

Shamanth

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

Adam

Again, I advertised for a product that was appropriate for people on Musical.ly At the time it was a very young platform and still is with TikTok.

Shamanth

Sophia, you talked a little while ago about how you considered doing videos that weren’t about beatboxing.

Adam a while ago spoke about how this FIFA guy gradually branched out into other genres. And also the guys you work with at Most Amazing, they have a bunch of channels, and I would imagine they started with one. 

So is there a research process that typically goes into understanding what we should do next, and how we should expand?

And you could certainly take the example of Most Amazing and how you guys went about expanding into the other channels. I’m curious if you can speak to that.

Sophia

We started the channel, very broad, top-down cars or something. Then we went into shocking things. And a lot more people would be wanting to watch more shocking things instead of just boring cars.

Because our audience is more 18 to 34. So we had people who researched the YouTube algorithm to see what our audience is looking for in our channel and what they like. So they like our hosts, Danny, Rebecca and Landon. They fell in love with them.

Then when they talked about the dumbest tweets or scary stuff, that’s when we found out that there are a lot of people on the channel and our subscribers would want to watch that stuff. 

Shamanth

So it sounds much like you did with your non-beatboxing video, you guys are basically reading your audience with every video you put out, you’re truly trying to understand where do we go next and that’s what informs what you launch next.

Sophia

Titling a video a certain way with keywords that YouTube would pick up and boost for us, and we would try to capitalize on that.

Shamanth

Right. Every video you put out is an A/B test for what could work and what couldn’t.

Sophia

Yeah. Every upload is a gamble, basically.

Shamanth

When you say it’s a gamble, I would imagine after having put in so many videos, you would have noticed some elements that are common to the videos that really blow up versus those that don’t. What might some of these elements be?

Sophia

It also depends on the thumbnails of the videos. Our channels are a little bit clickbaity. But the titles are what draw people in. And the host is what makes the people stay. So if they click on a video and they don’t like the host, they click out of the video right away.

Shamanth

Right. So it’s the theme, a thumbnail and the host.

Adam

In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with being clickbaity. You just have to be able to follow through with the bait.

Shamanth

Right, if you have something that’s truly amazing or truly shocking and you say it’s the ‘most amazing thing’ that brings people in and you deliver on it, I can see why you guys have a couple of million subscribers right now.

So Adam, when you are looking at some people like, Most Amazing top 10, or if you’re looking to work with somebody like Sophia, who’s just a huge beatboxer or somebody who’s very specialized, how do you vet them to ascertain whether this can work for a brand or an advertiser?

Adam

That’s probably one of the most challenging things about marketing. It is when you haven’t done anything and then you need to decide, “What is my audience? Where is my audience? What’s the proper channel?” And speaking from the perspective of a performance marketer when essentially you have no raw data to base our decisions on, we get pretty scared, right?

This isn’t something where it’s like, “Oh, okay, let me test a small ad campaign here, this ad campaign here”, and then you can compare click-through rates and install rates et cetera. It’s difficult. I would say this is what you need to step back a bit, and really think about who your customer is and who are the viewers of a video.

Now, YouTube gives infamously bad demographic data. If you try to ascertain the age of a channel based on the information that YouTube provides that channel, it’s really difficult.

For one, a lot of people watch on different people’s devices. You’ll have a kid watching on the parent’s device, especially with younger channels. A lot of content on YouTube is educational, so younger YouTube viewers will create a new account and say they’re older. So there are a lot of challenges. If you are interested in age, I find that browser type, whether you’re viewing on mobile or viewing on a desktop, that’s a much better indicator of age than actual demographics on YouTube.

It’s a decision that you can’t just make by looking at data, right? You have to look at the channel, the comments and watch the content. You really need to put in a bit of effort to understand what it’s about. That’s assuming you understand your own customer. A lot of people, maybe a little bit more open-minded about who their customers can be, but at the end of the day, you have to take the plunge and try a few new things. As you see what gains traction and what doesn’t, you can then make decisions. But I find that probably more often people jump to conclusions that they shouldn’t necessarily be jumping to based on something working or not working.

Shamanth

Got it. So you really dive into the channels because the data is so imperfect. You dive into the channel, you look at the comments, and you try to ascertain whether it’s a good fit for your client. Much in the same way that Sophia spoke about how she does customer research, so to speak, on the channel itself. But again, you have worked with hundreds of influencers, and I would imagine to vet them, you would have to study multiple of those influencers.

So how do you manage to do that without basically watching videos all day long,

Adam

There are shortcuts you can take, but outside of that, it’s a lot of work. I think this is one of the reasons why a lot of people struggle with it. A lot of people and brands kind of come into the influencer marketing space.

All of a sudden you see them sponsoring a bunch of things and then they just kind of disappear. You’ve seen that a lot over the years and far fewer sustainable brands who are doing this in a smart ROI-positive way because it’s really difficult. But there are brands doing that. It’s just hard work.

Shamanth

Yeah, and you have to play the long game, which means you have to watch a lot of this stuff. You have to understand both the influencers and the market you’re catering to. 

You spoke about how the data is so imperfect. How is the data so broken? Earlier this year you wrote an article titled, “Is 2019 the year that Influencer Marketing Grows up?” 

By the way, I think I find that title kind of astonishing because influencer marketing has been around for close to a decade, if not more. Yet the data is broken as you said. In that article you wrote, there’s a strong chance that in 2019, a major social platform, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, fully embraces influencer marketing by providing influencers and sponsors full access to the tools available to advertisers on the native ad platforms today.

This includes tools such as attribution, particularly view-through attribution, native CTA buttons, audience data, and retargeted capabilities. 

So why do you think it’s taken the platforms so long to build tools to cater to influencers when they have built very sophisticated tools that cater to advertisers and brands, and they’re being very forward-thinking in that regard.

Adam

I’m actually surprised that they’ve been able to move as fast as they have in the most recent years. You’re talking about potential disruption to a $50 billion business or a $100 billion business in a year. If you work at Google, you can look at me and somebody who’s sponsoring influencers directly and views me as direct competition to conventional advertising on your platform.

Here’s somebody who is paying somebody on our platform, thousands of dollars to advertise a product, and we’re not getting a single piece of that pie. Well that’s why we exist. Google exists to serve ads, right? So that’s one perspective on it. Now, from the other perspective, depending on where you work in Google, you love Adam for sponsoring content on their platform, right? Yeah, I’m enabling and encouraging YouTubers to create good content on their platform. 

Now, it’s not surprising that the first part of that argument was a lot stronger a few years back, and only really recently when all these platforms have really become to appreciate the content and the influencers on their platform and how much that’s worth that the shift has, has kind of begun to, “Hey, actually let’s embrace these direct influencer sponsorships”, because in the fight for content if they can make their platform a valuable place for their own influencers to post, they retain that content. 

You have companies like Snapchat, especially a few years back, that were investing literally hundreds of millions of dollars into content on their platform.

Meanwhile, they were completely ignoring the influencers on their platform and not really giving them any tools to grow and tools for advertisers like myself to sponsor them. I think they’ve come to realize now that it was a mistake and that the content that they’ve wanted for this platform has existed on it all along.

Not bringing in content from old traditional media companies onto the platform. It’s content that’s native right there, right? 

Vine is a great example of this. All these influencers who were really big on Vine back in this heyday, they very seamlessly took their audiences to YouTube.

Now there are some of the biggest YouTubers on that platform and ultimately these influencers control their audience almost as well as the platforms do. So it is a bit of a balance there. 

So I think the platforms have recognized that “Hey, by using advertisers to sponsor influencers on our platform, we’re just increasing the quality of content on our platform”. I think that has outweighed maybe a small negative effect on traditional advertising. I should say, for an advertiser like me, it’s really not an either-or decision. I work mostly with mobile apps, so I run my Google UAC ads.

I run my YouTube ads, I run my Instagram ads, I run my Facebook ads, I do all these things anyways. Alongside my influencer marketing. So it’s not like it’s an either or a thing. It’s certainly not a zero-sum.

Shamanth

So it sounds like a lot of the platforms have been increasingly open to, the open source nature of content creation that the influencer economy symbolizes.

Adam

They’re making progress. They’re not quite where they need to be, but they’re all making progress.

Shamanth

So, Adam, you said these companies aren’t quite there. Why the hesitation at this point, from the company’s part?

Adam

I think when you talk about these revenues in terms of many billions of dollars, It’s really hard to make a decision that can possibly adversely affect that.

Now YouTube has been really progressive on this front, in that they actually purchased FameBit. It’s an influencer platform to match brands with influencers. So technically speaking, Google itself now owns a piece of the pirate. If I do a deal on Bang Day, Google is getting 20%. It’s not the 40% cut they might be getting on a conventional ad, but they certainly still own a piece of the buy.

Shamanth

So it’s just taking a bit of time for them to really understand and just keep moving forward and integrate what’s going on here.

Adam

I think as another example, if I’m an influencer on Snapchat, theoretically speaking, the only way I can make money is through sponsored posts. The same goes for Instagram. So if you’re talking about this epic battle between these two platforms, trying to steal users from each other, if I’m an influencer, where’s my motivation to gain a following on Snapchat versus Instagram versus YouTube. 

It’s far easier to make money on YouTube than it is on Instagram or Snapchat. 

Shamanth

Sophia, speaking about the tools that aren’t quite present, the data that isn’t quite present, but that we hopefully see coming into place later this year or sometime soon, how do you feel about the current availability of tools for influencers?

How do you think the increasing proliferation of tools is going to affect you and the companies you work with as influencers? 

Sophia

I think the tools on each platform keep updating every day. So influencers have to learn the platform all over again and see. Because YouTube has changed every few years and their algorithms always change, so we always have to keep up with it.

Shamanth

What’s an example of an algorithm change that you have to keep up with?

Sophia

Well, the big one is the Adpocalypse.

Shamanth

What does that mean? 

Adam

I can add a bit of color commentary on this one. Adpocalypse was related to the Wall Street Journal a couple of years back, reporting on how these big advertisers and fortune 500 advertisers were running ads along all types of negative content on YouTube. So these are hate videos. There was a huge pushback on behalf of these brands. 

Google’s reaction was very swift. They pulled back on advertising on a lot of channels, which dramatically lowered CPMs and dramatically lowered the amount of money that many YouTubers made. And the content that was previously acceptable all of a sudden was now unacceptable that a lot of this happened purely algorithmically.

Some of it made sense and was legitimate. The others were just complete nonsense. People’s videos are being demonetized for no sensible reason that a human would ever see. This has been something that YouTube has been struggling with for a couple of years, and recently a lot of YouTubers are now having their videos demonetized because a record label will claim, “Hey, you know, they played three seconds of my music”, and what happens is the record then claims all ad revenue on that video going forward.

So these are challenges that YouTubers constantly have to have to deal with, that aren’t really under their control.

Sophia

Influencers have to make all content advertiser friendly to make it more monetizable. So we would have to change titles or thumbnails, and delete some videos. It was a very drastic change on YouTube. YouTube was picking up random words on titles or descriptions. Like the word, gay was controversial because they would demonetize the word gay, but it was like a friendly title.

Shamanth

When you say demonetize, does that mean that if you had the word gay in the title, the CPM would be much less than a video which didn’t have the word gay. Is that what would happen?

Sophia

No, it just cuts out the entire monetization. So it would get paid $0.

Shamanth

So, you guys had a fairly elaborate setup.

You guys have a team that’s putting out content. So you see a very abrupt drop in your revenues just because you just put in a word that you didn’t even know was triggering all the algorithms.

Sophia

Yeah. It just happened very suddenly.

Adam

And on top of that, when a video gets demonetized, YouTube no longer has the incentive to promote it, and so it essentially just dies right in the water.

Sophia

And you ranked your channel as well.

Shamanth

How did you deal with it, Sophia, when you were like, “Oh, I just put, put in this very innocuous word and I’m not making any money? Clearly, we made way less money this month compared to last month, and we have bills to pay.” How do you deal with that?

Sophia

So for a while you couldn’t really contact YouTube, now you can contact YouTube or request for review. So you have to go into the back end of your channel and you have to request for review and they would review your video and decide if it is ad-friendly or not friendly.

Shamanth

Got it. But at the time what did you guys do?

Sophia

We had to cut hours. It set us back a little bit, but then I did pitch the sponsorship aspect. I pitched a whole department in my workplace, went on FameBit, and reached out to multiple brands. That’s how I actually met Adam. So that boosted us up a little bit more, so thanks to sponsorships we broke even from the Adpocalypse

Shamanth

Fighting the ad-apocalypse was never easy. You spoke about how you went out and pitched these brands. You didn’t start out as a deal maker or a business person. You started off as a creator and like a lot of influencers you would have had to transition from being a creative to a business person to learning business skills and you’re CMO of Most Amazing right now. So what is a learning curve for you to go from being a creator to being a business person?

Sophia

It’s 12 years of being on YouTube. I was really into looking for sponsorships for influencers because ever since my first sponsorship deal with Kelloggs, I knew it was a thing that people can do. A lot of influencers on YouTube were doing it, so why can’t we do it? 

Back then we had 4 million subscribers or so. I thought, “We haven’t had any sponsorships. Why?” So I went and made this department happen and I hired a team of people to look for sponsorship deals as well.

It has been doing pretty well and now I’m trying to bring on new influencers to my clientele to look for sponsorship deals for them.

Shamanth

So because you had seen that sponsorships could work for yourself as a person with Kelloggs, you thought why can’t we just try this with the brands I’m working with. 

You built out a department, you built out a team. What does the team look like at Most Amazing?

Sophia

It was small. We would have different tasks, different goals, small goals, and big goals. I would try to reach out to as many channels as possible, because we have about five or six channels.

Shamanth

So you treat yourself as a media business and as sales operations professionals, thinking how do we get as many advertisers, as many sponsors as possible?

Sophia

Yeah

Shamanth

Cool. This has been very fascinating and I would very much love to go on forever, but this is perhaps a good time for us to start wrapping up.

Can you tell our listeners how they can find out more about you?

Sophia

So I am on Instagram, as Sophia Kid Beatz, and my YouTube channel is youtube.com/rman2k.

If there’s any influencers who are looking for sponsors and help could email me at sophiabeatbox@gmail.com. 

Shamanth

Excellent. 

Adam, tell us how people can find out about you.

Adam

It’s @adamhadi on Twitter.

Shamanth

Thank you again for being on the show, Adam. Thank you so much, Sophia. 

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