Park: Pricing influencer deals based on follower counts is misinformation
David Park · REVEALED: The Exact Strategy I Used to Build a $10M AI Startup · Feb 26, 2025 · at 43:44
David Park, founder of Jenny AI, critiques standard online guides that tell startups to pay influencers based on follower tiers rather than actual video views or conversion performance.
0:00 / 0:31exact quote · 31.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“All of the top articles will tell you to pay based on followers. They will tell you straight up, like, they will give you a chart. The top article has a chart of, like, if they have this much, then they're a micro-celebrity. You pay a thousand. If they have this much, they're a celebrity celebrity. You should pay this much. It's, like, the most craziest misinformation that's probably causing like, junior social media people at, like, their various companies around the world To just really pay influencers like insane amounts of money that they will never get an ROI on”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from David Park
Park: Sponsoring fresh accounts beats sponsoring 1M-subscriber YouTubers
“I would unironically sponsor a fresh account made this week versus a YouTuber with a million subs if they had similar views, and I don't even think it's a controversial opinion.”
Park: Paying $20k-$30k for YouTuber sponsorships will never yield positive ROI
“You can pay them, you know, literally one 100th of the price to sponsor because these YouTubers, they're kind of, they've been spoiled by the Nord VPNs and the Grammarly's and the, you know, the Sony sponsorships. They expect like 20,000 dollars for a 32nd You…”
Park: Short-form creator follower count does not matter if views are equal
“If you have somebody that you know creates good content that's getting similar views, like let's say, MengMingduck has 300 K followers, and then there's like, MengMingBear over here that has 20 K followers, and they both have similar views, you know, like you …”
Park: 50K-View Videos Generated Hundreds of Thousands, 20M-View Video Drove Almost Nothing
“We've had videos where it got 50,000 views and it's converted to, it's literally brought us in hundreds of thousand dollars in revenue, and I remember the saddest time ever was we had one video that got twenty million views, one video, and it almost had a negl…”
Park: Social algorithms reward posting similar video formats five times daily
“I've seen competitors That really just crank it out, like, five videos a day. I didn't believe that this possibly could be rewarded by the algorithm. Like, how could you possibly want accounts? Like, why would you reward accounts posting the same videos, like,…”
Park: Follower count matters for outreach credibility, not content reach
“That's maybe the only thing left that's, like, actually helpful with follower numbers is, like, if you want to talk with other creators or if you want to, like, do outreach like this. Otherwise, the follower's number doesn't really matter that much in terms of…”