Crypto influencer pricing correlates with follower count, and follower count correlates weakly with anything that matters. That gap is where the money goes, and closing it is mostly unglamorous checking.<\/p>\n
Vetting is only meaningful against an objective. A creator who is excellent for reaching developers is the wrong buy for reaching allocators, and no amount of engagement analysis will tell you that \u2014 only the brief will.<\/p>\n
Write down, before you look at a single account, what this campaign is supposed to change and for whom. Then the checks below become decisions rather than a scorecard.<\/p>\n
A headline engagement rate is easy to inflate. What is harder to fake is the shape: do a handful of posts carry everything, or is engagement broadly consistent? Are replies substantive or a wall of emoji from the same accounts? Does engagement scale with reach or plateau abruptly?<\/p>\n
A creator with a tenth of the followers and consistent, substantive replies is usually a better buy than one with a spiky graph and a large number attached.<\/p>\n
The most common waste in an influencer programme is paying five creators to reach substantially the same people. In tight verticals the overlap can be severe.<\/p>\n
Check it before you contract, not after. If two creators share most of an audience, you are buying frequency, which is a legitimate choice \u2014 but it should be a choice, not an accident you paid five times for.<\/p>\n
This is the single strongest signal and it takes twenty minutes. Scroll back two years. What have they promoted? What happened to it?<\/p>\n
A creator with a trail of collapsed projects behind them is telling you their selection standard, and their audience knows it too \u2014 which is why the placement will underperform regardless of reach. A creator who has turned things down publicly, or who has posted a correction, is demonstrating something much more valuable.<\/p>\n
Do their paid posts carry disclosure? Consistently, or only sometimes? A creator who discloses inconsistently is a compliance exposure for you<\/em>, not just for them, and inconsistency usually means they disclose when the client insists.<\/p>\n A creator who refuses disclosure terms is disqualified. This is not a negotiation and we do not make exceptions, because the entire value of the placement depends on the audience not feeling deceived when they work it out.<\/p>\n Steady growth is normal. Vertical steps are not, unless they map to something explicable \u2014 a viral post, a major appearance, a platform recommendation. Unexplained step changes are worth asking about directly, and the quality of the answer is itself informative.<\/p>\n Where is the audience, and does it match the market you actually serve? A creator with enormous reach in a region where your product is unavailable is reach you cannot use. This sounds obvious and is routinely ignored.<\/p>\n A creator who pushes back on the messaging, asks how the product works, or declines to say something they do not believe is a better partner than one who reads the script. The first will produce a placement their audience trusts; the second will produce one their audience scrolls past.<\/p>\n Roughly an hour per creator, and it consistently saves more than it costs. The alternative \u2014 buying on follower count and reporting impressions afterwards \u2014 is cheaper to execute and produces campaigns nobody can evaluate.<\/p>\n5. Growth pattern<\/h2>\n
6. Audience composition<\/h2>\n
7. How they handle the brief<\/h2>\n
Red flags that end the conversation<\/h2>\n
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What this costs<\/h2>\n