Influencer Marketing Lead Gen — YouTube Creator Contact & Lead-Scoring API for AI Agents

Influencer-campaign lead generation for marketing teams and AI agents. Give it an industry — fitness, beauty, gaming, anything — and it discovers real creators on YouTube, enriches each one with their channel description, external websites, and extracted contact emails, and returns typed JSON lead rows (schema below) ranked by a contactability lead score. It also keeps a URL-verification mode for pruning and tagging existing lead lists. Unlike directory scrapers that only return names and handles, every lead here ships with an actual outreach path — an email, a website, or both.

Why agents use this influencer marketing lead-gen actor

• Contactable leads, not just names — every creator row includes extracted emails, website links, subscriber count, and a leadScore so outreach can start immediately.
• Deterministic typed output — every row matches the published dataset schema; fields are stable and nullable-typed.
• No auth, cookies, or login — discovery and enrichment work on public pages out of the box.
• Clear error semantics — bad input or zero results ends the run with exit code 1 and a status message; per-item failures land in a SUMMARY key-value record, never silently dropped.
• Rate-limit handling built in — automatic retry with backoff on HTTP 429 and 5xx responses.

Modes

1. Lead generation (default) — pass industry; the actor discovers up to maxResults creators and enriches each one.
2. URL verification — pass urls / url / startUrls; each URL is fetched and returned as a {url, statusCode, ok, title, industry} row (unchanged from earlier versions).

Input schema

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
industry	string	Yes	"fitness"	Industry/niche to discover creators in. Copied into every output row.
maxResults	integer	No	20	Max creator leads to discover and enrich (1–50).
platforms	array of strings	Yes	["instagram", "tiktok", "youtube"]	Platforms the campaign targets (run-labeling metadata; discovery currently runs on YouTube).
urls	array of strings	No	—	Switches to URL-verification mode: each URL becomes one verification row.
url	string	No	—	Alias for a single URL (verification mode).
startUrls	array	No	—	Alternative URL list; plain strings or { "url": "..." } objects (verification mode).
maxRequestsPerCrawl	integer	No	20	Max unique URLs processed in verification mode.
proxyConfiguration	object	No	—	Reserved. Requests currently go direct.

Output schema

Lead-generation mode (one row per discovered creator)

Field	Type	Nullable	Description
platform	string	No	Source platform — currently "youtube".
name	string	Yes	Creator/channel display name.
handle	string	Yes	Channel handle, e.g. @xeelafitness7528.
profileUrl	string	Yes	Full channel URL.
subscribers	string	Yes	Subscriber count as displayed, e.g. "331K subscribers".
industry	string	No	The industry input, copied into every row.
description	string	Yes	Full channel description from the about page.
websites	string[]	No	External website links published on the channel.
emails	string[]	No	Contact emails extracted from the description and the creator's websites (deduplicated, max 5).
contactable	boolean	No	True when the lead has at least one email or website.
leadScore	integer	No	3 = email found, 2 = website only, 1 = neither.

Example item:

{
  "platform": "youtube",
  "name": "Fitness Culture",
  "handle": "@FitnessCulture",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@FitnessCulture",
  "subscribers": "91K subscribers",
  "industry": "fitness",
  "description": "Fitness Culture is here to provide world-class Training, Nutrition, and Mobility Programs...",
  "websites": ["https://fitnessculture.com", "https://www.instagram.com/fitnessculture"],
  "emails": ["support@fitnessculture.com"],
  "contactable": true,
  "leadScore": 3
}

URL-verification mode (one row per fetched URL)

Field	Type	Nullable	Description
url	string	No	The lead page URL that was fetched.
statusCode	integer	No	HTTP status code (200, 404, ...).
ok	boolean	No	True when status is 2xx.
title	string	Yes	Page <title> text, null when absent.
industry	string	Yes	The industry input value.

{
  "url": "https://www.apify.com",
  "statusCode": 200,
  "ok": true,
  "title": "Apify: Full-stack web scraping and data extraction platform",
  "industry": "influencer marketing"
}

Error semantics

• No industry and no URLs — exits immediately with code 1 and a message. Nothing is written to the dataset.
• Discovery returns zero creators — exits with code 1 (No creators found for industry "..."); try a broader term.
• Per-creator enrichment failure — the lead row is still emitted from discovery data; the failure is recorded in the SUMMARY key-value record ({ mode, industry, discovered, pushed, withContactSignal, failed, failures }).
• Creator websites that don't respond within 3 s are skipped best-effort; the lead keeps its other signals.
• Verification mode — after 3 attempts a failed URL goes to SUMMARY, never a billed row; if all URLs fail the run exits with code 1.

Retry logic for agents: exit code 1 with an input-shaped message is permanent — fix the input. Exit code 1 on discovery may be transient — retry once, then inspect SUMMARY.

Use from AI agents (MCP)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=apricot_blackberry/influencer-marketing-lead-gen",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" }
    }
  }
}

Works in Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT deep research connectors, and any MCP client; the input schema above is the tool's parameter schema.

Use from code

curl:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/apricot_blackberry~influencer-marketing-lead-gen/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"industry":"fitness","platforms":["youtube"],"maxResults":10}'

JavaScript (apify-client):

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor('apricot_blackberry/influencer-marketing-lead-gen').call({
  industry: 'fitness',
  platforms: ['youtube'],
  maxResults: 10,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Python (apify_client):

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])
run = client.actor("apricot_blackberry/influencer-marketing-lead-gen").call(run_input={
    "industry": "fitness",
    "platforms": ["youtube"],
    "maxResults": 10,
})
items = client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).list_items().items
print(items)

Use from automation platforms

• n8n / Make / Zapier — use the native Apify integration and choose this actor by name (influencer-marketing-lead-gen).
• LangChain / LlamaIndex — use the Apify tool wrappers (ApifyActorsTool / Apify reader) with the same input JSON.
• Webhooks — Apify can fire a webhook when a run finishes (or on other run-lifecycle events), so new leads can land straight in a CRM or outreach sequence — configure one from the actor's Integrations tab or the API.

Pricing

Pay-per-event, billed by the Apify platform:

Event	Price	Charged
Actor start	$0.05	Once per run
Result delivered	$0.01	Per lead row in the dataset

A run of 20 leads (default maxResults) costs roughly $0.05 + 20 × $0.01 = $0.25. This actor makes direct requests and does not use proxies.

FAQ

Where do the emails come from? From the creator's public channel description and their linked websites — the actor fetches each external site and extracts published contact addresses.

Which platforms are covered? Discovery runs on YouTube, where creators publish the richest public contact signals; the platforms input labels the campaign for downstream segmentation.

Do lead rows and verification rows mix? No — a run is either lead-generation (industry) or verification (URLs); passing URLs selects verification mode.

How fresh is the data? Every run performs live discovery and enrichment; nothing is cached.

Does influencer marketing lead gen need a YouTube API key or login? No. Discovery and enrichment both run against public YouTube pages — no API key, account, or session cookie required.

Note: emails are only found when a creator publishes them; leads without a public email still include websites and the channel URL for outreach.

Changelog

2026-08-15

• New lead-generation engine: live YouTube creator discovery by industry, channel-description and website enrichment, contact-email extraction, and lead scoring.
• New output fields: platform, name, handle, profileUrl, subscribers, description, websites, emails, contactable, leadScore.
• New maxResults input; industry now drives discovery.
• URL-verification mode retained unchanged for existing integrations.

2026-08-14

• Published dataset output schema and agent-first documentation (MCP, API, SDK snippets).
• Fail-loud behavior: empty input or zero results exits with code 1.
• Per-item failures moved to the SUMMARY key-value record; retries with backoff on 429/5xx.