Vetting influencers and pricing influencers is part of the same process. Here’s how I vet influencers after making plenty of mistakes.
A few years ago I signed a YouTuber for $20,000.
On paper he looked perfect. Every time you searched anything about our product on YouTube, his videos were right at the top. Good engagement. Real niche fit. So we paid.
He didn’t perform. A few months later, an agency offered us the exact same creator for $7,000.
Same guy. A third of the price. And at $7K the math actually would have worked.
I think about that one a lot, because the mistake wasn’t really the price. It was the vetting. We judged him on his subscriber count and his most viral videos, and then we paid for that feeling. So before we ever talk about money, let me walk you through how I actually vet a creator now.
One thing up front. I do most of this manually. There are plenty of tools that will sell you an “influencer audit,” and some are fine, but the most valuable read you’ll ever get is you, going through their profile with your own eyes.
Start with the profile
The first thing I do when vetting influencers is open the profile and look at the content itself. The style, the quality. Does it genuinely fit the brand, or am I forcing it?
Then I look at reach and followers. And this is the part people get wrong. It is not about the number of followers. It is about the proportion.
I want to see how a creator’s reach and engagement compare to the size of their following. Someone with 30,000 followers pulling big reach and real conversation in the comments is far more interesting to me than someone with 300,000 followers and silence.
Read the comments, and watch for pods
Then I read the comments. Not how many, the quality. Are people actually talking about the content? Or is it the same handful of accounts dropping heart emojis on every post?
That second one is one of the biggest red flags I still see constantly. Engagement pods. It is a group of creators who agree to like and comment on each other’s content to game the algorithm. It makes the engagement rate look amazing. But those are not buyers. Those are other influencers returning a favor.
You can spot a pod when the comments do not match the content. Someone posts something serious and the comments are all “love this!” with nothing about the actual topic. Or it is the same cluster of accounts every single time. Once you start looking for it, you cannot un-see it.
Check demographics with first-party data
Once a profile passes that eye test, I look at audience demographics. My favorite source is first-party data, so I go to the TikTok Creator Marketplace and the Meta Creator Marketplace. First-party data is always best because it comes straight from the platform, not from a third-party estimate.
If I cannot find them there, I just ask. When I reach out about rates, I ask the creator to send screenshots of their audience demographics from their own account. Any serious creator has these ready.
This is where another red flag I see all the time shows up. Demographics that do not match the content they post. Someone makes content about a specific local topic, and then their audience is 70% in a country you do not even ship to. That becomes your problem, because you are about to pay for an audience that cannot buy from you.
Look at the track record
Next I check whether they have worked with competitors or similar products, and how that content performed.
One comparison I always run: their sponsored content versus their non-sponsored content. You want the sponsored stuff to perform similar to their organic stuff. If their normal videos do great and their brand deals fall off a cliff, that tells you their audience does not trust their recommendations. And that is exactly what you would be paying for.
Google the big ones
Especially with mega influencers, where the spend is high, I do something basic that people skip. I google them.
I once pulled out of a partnership with a doctor right at the contract stage. I had finished negotiating and was about to send the contract over, and something made me google him one last time. I found FDA warnings about him. If I had skipped that thirty-second search and signed, our brand would have been sitting right next to his. The bigger the creator and the bigger the check, the more you owe the brand that boring background check.
Vetting tells you the price
Here is the thing that ties it all together. Everything above is not just about whether to work with a creator. It is about what to pay them.
The reason I overpaid by $13,000 is that I vetted on the wrong signals and then priced on those same signals. Get the vetting right, and the price almost figures itself out.
I broke down exactly how I price a creator now in this YouTube video on how to vet and what to actually pay influencers, including the simple formula I work backward from. And if you want the shortcut, I built a free Influencer Rate Calculator that does the math for you.
If you would rather see the whole thing in action, I walk through how to vet influencers and my pricing process in the video above.
Want a real number to anchor your next negotiation? Use our free Influencer Rate Calculator. It factors in reach, niche, status, and follower count.
When you are vetting more than a handful of creators at once, the hard part stops being the analysis and becomes keeping it all straight. That is what Amplify Influencer is for. Each creator profile keeps your notes, their data, and the rate calculator on one screen, so you can vet and price in the same place instead of living in fifteen browser tabs.