Follower count is the worst predictor of campaign performance we've ever measured. It's barely correlated with engagement, reach, or conversion. We stopped sorting shortlists by follower count three years ago. Here's what we sort by instead.
The 11-point checklist
- Audience geography (does it match the campaign market?)
- Audience age & gender distribution
- Comment-to-view ratio (engagement quality, not quantity)
- Save & share rates
- Past brand partnerships (frequency, fit, sustained or one-off)
- Content cadence consistency
- Response rate during creative briefing
- Past content sentiment (manual review of last 30 posts)
- Platform health (no shadowban or recent strikes)
- Brand-safety risk on past topics
- Real-time analytics export (yes, we ask for screenshots)
What 47 minutes looks like
Fifteen minutes pulling platform analytics. Fifteen reviewing last 30 posts manually. Ten on a discovery call. Seven writing it up. Done. If we can't get to a yes / no in under an hour, the creator is not a fit.
JN
Written by
Jakub Nowak · Gaming Partnerships
