With the overhaul, YouTube aims to eliminate the need for laborious influencer discovery that has historically required agency planning and resources paired with manual keyword- or tag-based searches.
In the near future, the process will be even easier, Nikolic suggested: “In the coming months, advertisers will be able to simply input their campaign brief. Our AI will recommend the ideal creators to drive a marketer’s goal.”
YouTube has also embedded a unified measurement feature into Creator Partnerships. Here, paid ads and organic creator content performance data come together in one workflow, in theory making it easier for marketers to get a clean, deduplicated look into the material impact of their creator partnership investments.
The company is making Creator Partnerships available to some partners via API, enabling marketing agencies or SaaS companies to plug the discovery and matching capabilities into their own tools.
“Creator marketing has matured into a core growth channel, but the industry has lacked the depth of measurement needed to scale with confidence,” said Tim Sovay, the chief business development and partnerships officer at influencer marketing platform Creator IQ, in a statement. He said that the rollout of the Creator Partnerships API will help give advertisers “trusted, first-party insights that help unlock deep creator audience understanding within their existing workflows,” whether on YouTube or on another platform like CreatorIQ.
On the whole, however, YouTube is now positioning itself as a comprehensive operating system for creator marketing—compared to a platform that simply aids in influencer partnerships. In the process of that transformation, YouTube could threaten the businesses of third-party creator platforms.
