When it comes to creator discovery, the influencer marketing industry has primarily focused on Instagram and TikTok, leaving a vacancy in YouTube that many have neglected to address. This gap persists despite YouTube being home to the most financially successful content creators. ChannelCrawler, founded in January 2023, has positioned itself to fill this need—building the “world’s largest YouTube-specific database” with over 200 million creators and more than 40 specialized search filters.

“YouTube is probably last in consideration for other platforms because influencer marketing has always been an Instagram and then later on TikTok first approach,” explains Jake Kitchiner, ChannelCrawler’s co-founder. “I’ll bet that YouTube is coming big and hard to do more sponsorship and affiliates, and make it easier for brands to do so. And we think as that uptick comes, we’ll be in the right place to then grow with that as well.”

This deliberate specialization in YouTube reflects a calculated assessment of creator economics. “When you’re pitching a service to a creator, generally, YouTubers tend to make the most money and they stick around for the longest,” Jake points out. “If you look at the top 10 creators in terms of financial wealth, they’re all on YouTube in some form.”

The London-based company’s platform enables targeted searches by niche, category, keyword, subscriber count, view metrics, location, and numerous other parameters that matter to marketers seeking the right YouTube partnerships.

The ChannelCrawler Value Proposition

At its core, ChannelCrawler offers a solution that addresses several challenges in YouTube creator discovery. Jake’s story of founding the company began with his own frustration while searching for YouTube channels to sponsor. “It’s honestly like a nightmare,” he recalls of the process. “To get really into the nitty-gritty of what you want to do and go through that process. It was super difficult.”

This firsthand experience informed the development of ChannelCrawler into a platform specifically designed to make YouTube creator discovery efficient, cost-effective, and thorough. The platform serves various stakeholders in the creator economy through two distinct pricing tiers: a starter subscription at $59 monthly that provides basic filters and list-building capabilities for those looking to find their first few creator partnerships, and a more detailed $195 monthly plan that unlocks the full range of search filters and contact capabilities.

“We’re really passionate about having a very entry-level subscription amount where you can come use some basic filters and just build a list to get like your first, second, and third influencer that you work with,” Jake explains. “For smaller teams, $200 can be a lot. Maybe it’s hard to get the budget approved, but $59 just feels like people can come and they can start.”

For enterprises requiring larger volumes of creator contacts, ChannelCrawler offers flexible options for accessing thousands of creator emails, with credits that never expire. This approach makes the platform accessible to businesses at any stage, from startups making their first creator connections to established companies scaling their YouTube marketing efforts.

Competitive Differentiation Through Specialization

ChannelCrawler’s YouTube-specific approach is its main differentiator from platforms offering broader influencer marketing suites across multiple platforms.

The company has also deliberately positioned itself as an alternative to influencer marketplaces, which Jake believes lead to the “commoditization of influencers.” Drawing on his background in entertainment and appreciation for the creation process, Jake expresses concern about the direction of influencer marketing: “If you pay $250, you’ll get three shorts. And those shorts tend to rinse and repeat all of the time. The influencer is really just doing it for the money, and they’re not particularly invested in the brand.”

Instead, ChannelCrawler provides brands with the tools to find and directly approach creators who align with their values and target audience. “We think it’s better for people, they have more control over the process. They can reach out to any influencer or channel and say, ‘This is what we want to do.’ And that channel can be like, ‘Oh, this is how we could work it,'” Jake explains. 

Technology Powering Discovery

ChannelCrawler’s market positioning is enabled by its data operation and technical capabilities. The platform updates channel information daily to ensure accuracy, employing both automated and manual processes to collect creator email addresses from about pages and capture forms.

“The quality of our data is super important to us,” Jake emphasizes. “We only really have one point of marketing and one thing that we talk about—that we are a YouTube database that you can get accurate, up-to-date data from and contact information. And so if it’s not good, people will leave because we have nothing else to lean on.”

Recent technical advances have enhanced the platform’s capabilities, with artificial intelligence now playing a crucial role in categorizing channels. “What we’ve now been able to do with AI is put every channel through a categorization process. It gets a confidence score against all of the categories and subcategories, of which we have over 300,” Jake explains. “Anyone that gets a confidence score of 0.7 or above, we say, ‘Okay, that’s a match.’”

This AI-powered categorization enhances search relevance when users seek creators in specific niches. “When you type in crypto, it takes into account not just the fact that crypto has been mentioned, but now we use AI to help us improve the process of how many times it’s been mentioned, where it’s been mentioned, and therefore we order by relevance,” Jake says, adding that this technical edge enables ChannelCrawler to deliver more precise results than basic keyword matching can achieve.

Customers and Results

ChannelCrawler serves two primary use cases. First, it helps businesses at early stages identify their initial creator partnerships and define their target market. For one startup, AsqMe—a platform where creators charge audiences to answer questions—ChannelCrawler helped secure their first and most active customers.

“Not only did we get them a financial win and make it profitable in the sense of them earning more back from the campaign than they spent on it,” Jake recalls, “but the really key thing is they were then able to say, ‘this is who our target market is.'” Through ChannelCrawler’s outreach, Askme identified eight categories of different types of creators likely to get asked questions, providing crucial market intelligence for their growth strategy.

The second key use case is helping established businesses scale beyond their existing networks to reach untapped creator segments. “There are so many creators who aren’t involved in anything anywhere,” Jake notes, explaining how ChannelCrawler helps companies discover creators who aren’t plugged into traditional industry circles but have built large audiences. 

He shares an example of meeting a UK-based Bangladeshi content creator with 50,000 subscribers who speaks about life in that community and, as a result, taps into a world that most others can’t reach—exactly the type of opportunity ChannelCrawler helps brands uncover. “There are people like her that people are desperate to partner with, but they have no way of finding them. ChannelCrawler gives you a way to find those kinds of people and start an outreach message to them.”

The company’s specialized approach has attracted notable clients, including Vimeo, WSC Sports, Circle.so, Superpeer, EMC Talent, Jellysmack, and MediaCube.

Understanding the YouTube Environment

As YouTube itself changes, with an increasing focus on Shorts, shifting viewing habits, and new discovery features, ChannelCrawler continues to adapt its approach to remain relevant in the market.

Jake has observed several changes in how people consume YouTube content: “Just how much more people are starting to watch YouTube on TV. So it’s always been a thing for me, but now when I mentioned I watch it on TV, I got far less weird looks.” This shift has implications for creator metrics and engagement. “Engagement levels will go down technically because it’s harder to engage when people are watching it on TV. And so the metrics and the way that people watch and talk about YouTube are going to change quite a lot.”

As Jake notes, these changes present both challenges and opportunities for ChannelCrawler as it refines its platform. Jake also notes the different content dynamics across platforms: “TikTok is different. I feel like it’s a little less produced, more just fun, organic moments versus the higher production that goes into it, the well-thought-out, polished, and edited that Instagram loves.”

A Collaborative Approach Among Competitors

Despite working in a competitive area, Jake takes a collaborative approach to industry relationships. “We’re friends with a lot of our competitors,” he reveals, mentioning recent meetings with leaders from platforms like SARAL and other companies.

“There’s so much space and there’s so much opportunity in the creator economy,” Jake explains. “I don’t think that means that we need to be wolves at each other.”

This collaborative philosophy extends to ChannelCrawler’s approach with customers. Rather than pushing their product on everyone, the team sometimes steers potential customers away if they believe their platform isn’t the right fit. “If they use it and the purpose is wrong, or they don’t get the outcome that they want, they blame the tool,” Jake says. “Even though it’s not our fault, there’s still that association, there’s still that bad rap. So we’d rather steer people away from it.”

ChannelCrawler’s Roadmap

As ChannelCrawler approaches its third year, the company is expanding its capabilities through several planned features. “There’ll be a big release soon on the sponsored channels, and you can view those and get a really solid outline performance of what a brand is doing,” Jake reveals. This feature enables users to review competitor sponsorship activities, view which sponsored videos have performed well, and identify potential brand partners.

By the fourth quarter of this year, the company plans to enable creators to verify themselves through the platform, facilitating data sharing with sponsoring brands and agencies. “Just making it a nice, more of a full suite thing that you can actually see how a campaign is going and get live data updated,” Jake explains.

The company is also developing more flexible API integrations with other platforms. “The API access has had some really good feedback so far, but I think there’s a lot more flexibility that we can make within it, and there are integrations into other platforms that will be super helpful that give people access to the data in an easier way,” says Jake.

Throughout these expansions, ChannelCrawler continues to maintain its core focus on YouTube creator discovery. “We never lose focus on what is at the core of what we do,” Jake emphasizes. “And that is making sure that there are more channels, more contact information, and that we’ve got data that people want and is interesting to them, and they can find it in a way that suits them.”