With $3.3M in funding, Boostinsider bets on Social Book for YouTube influencer insights

Silicon Valley-based startup Boostinsider launches light version of its core product to help marketers evaluate YouTube influencers.

In the digital economy, influencer marketing is booming across social media platforms. With YouTube leading the video segment, agencies and brands are increasingly working with influencers to reach out to audiences. Understanding the reach of influencers becomes is extremely important in this scenario.

AI-based influencer marketing intelligence platform Boostinsider recently launched Social Book, a light version of its core product, which helps marketers and brands access analytics of YouTubers.

Unlike some other social analytics platforms that only allow influencers to access their own data, Social Book is designed for everyone, especially marketers and agencies. By searching a YouTuber’s username or channel link, you can view real-time data analytics for that YouTube channel, including channel market value, video performance, audience demographics, history of brands mentioned and related channels. It helps marketers identify if the influencer is right for its brands, and gives them a reference price for negotiation with influencers on their branded content.

Influencer marketing saw explosive growth in 2016, with 86 percent of marketers using it; 94 percent of them found it effective, according to The State of Influencer Marketing 2017 report by marketing provider Linqia. The report adds that 78 percent of marketers cite determining influencer marketing ROI as their top challenge in 2017.

Boostinsider, launched in 2014, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding, followed by $1.8 million in Series A funding. They started out as an automated marketplace for brands to pay influencers to post on social media. But they soon realised the two key problems for the marketplace: first, the marketers didn’t know if the influencers who approached them had the right audience for their product; second, only micro-influencers were most active in the marketplace, limiting their choice for influencer marketing campaigns.

Second-generation product

To tackle these problems, Boostinsider started work on the second generation of its product, focusing on creating data-driven solutions of over 350K of the most engaged influencers on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook.

Heidi Yu and Chen Wang are the Co-founders of Boostinsider and serve as the CEO and CTO respectively. The startup claims to have 200k+ influencer signups and a reach of a 500-million strong audience. They work with around 300 brands currently and hope to hit a revenue of more than $10 million in 2018.

“With the use of machine learning and AI technology, we now can estimate the ‘price’ of any YouTuber in the world. We can also estimate the demographic data, which includes but is not limited to male/female percentage, country distribution, age distribution, and interest distribution. We can even estimate how many clicks and downloads you can get if you ask a specific YouTuber to do a potential promotional video for you,” says Chen, who worked with Walmart Labs and Microsoft before starting Boostinsider.