YouTube Influencer Finder — creator profiles, socials and fit scores

Type a niche keyword, get an outreach-ready list of YouTube influencers: the channels that rank for that phrase, their subscriber and view stats, a 0-100 fit score with written reasons, and the social profiles the creator published on the channel — each with the URL that proves it.

Measured on live runs: 73% of channels found for a niche keyword ship with Instagram and 82% with some social profile, while none of them published an email. Socials are the promise here. An address is included when a creator published one; do not plan a campaign around it.

Built for influencer-marketing agencies, DTC brands and PR teams. One channel = one row = one billed row; rows already fetched in the last 24 hours come from cache and cost nothing.

What does the YouTube Influencer Finder do?

It runs your keywords through YouTube search, collects every channel that ranks for them (from the channel results and the creators behind ranking videos), enriches each with public stats, scores fit, then collects the contact routes the creator published on the channel: social profiles first, plus an email when there is one. Reading the creator's own site is an opt-in extra, billed per attempt and rarely productive. Output is a flat table: one row per channel, 26 fixed columns, evidence URLs included.

It does not send outreach, guess addresses or track creators over time. It answers one question per run: which creators should I contact about this niche, and where do I reach them?

Why use the YouTube Influencer Finder

• Keyword in, contactable creators out. Up to 20 channels per keyword, unlimited keywords per run.
• Contact routes with provenance. Every profile and address carries an evidenceUrl, so you see where it came from.
• A fit score you can audit. fitReasons lists each component with its points, adding up to fitScore — no black box.
• Size bands for campaign planning. nano/micro/mid/macro/mega, plus a minSubscribers floor.
• Honest gaps. A hidden counter or a creator with no website comes back as null with a stated reason — never a zero or an invented value.
• Pay per channel, cache free. $0.020 per delivered row on the Free plan, $0.011 on Gold and above; a cache hit costs nothing beyond the one-time run start.

How to find YouTube influencers and their social profiles

1. Fill the Niche keywords field — one phrase per line, e.g. dog training. Each keyword is searched separately and its channels are scored against that phrase.
2. Optionally pick a Country and Language to prospect a market; leave both on "Auto" for YouTube's defaults.
3. Set Channels per keyword (default and maximum 20 = one search page) and, for larger creators only, a Minimum subscribers floor.
4. Leave Parse the creator's website for contacts on to also read the site linked from the channel. Off by default: billed per attempt, and most creator sites return nothing.
5. Run the Actor — rows stream into the dataset as each channel finishes.
6. Open the Overview view for the shortlist, then export to JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull the rows from the API into your CRM.

Minimal input:

{ "keywords": ["dog training"], "maxChannels": 20 }

Market run with a size floor:

{ "keywords": ["dog training"], "country": "GB", "language": "en", "minSubscribers": 10000 }

What data you get per channel

One dataset row = one channel prospect, always the same 26 keys. Example row:

{
  "keyword": "dog training",
  "channelId": "UC7bK1nQ9vX2mYt4LpR0sZaQ",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7bK1nQ9vX2mYt4LpR0sZaQ",
  "channelTitle": "Puppy Academy",
  "handle": "@puppyacademy",
  "subscribers": 128000,
  "videoCount": 412,
  "totalViews": 31204880,
  "joinedDate": "2018-03-04",
  "channelCountry": null,
  "uploadCadenceDays": null,
  "avgViewsRecent": null,
  "sizeBand": "mid",
  "fitScore": 85,
  "fitReasons": [
    "Audience: 128,000 subscribers (mid band) — 23/38 fit points.",
    "Activity: upload cadence unavailable — not scored, its weight moved to the other components.",
    "Niche match: 2/2 keyword terms (dog, training) found in the channel title, description or recent video titles — 62/62 fit points."
  ],
  "contactEmails": [
    { "email": "bookings@puppyacademy.example", "source": "channel-about", "evidenceUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7bK1nQ9vX2mYt4LpR0sZaQ" }
  ],
  "socials": [{ "platform": "instagram", "url": "https://www.instagram.com/puppyacademy" }, { "platform": "tiktok", "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@puppyacademy" }],
  "website": "https://puppyacademy.example",
  "siteContactUrl": "https://puppyacademy.example",
  "siteParsed": true,
  "contactConfidence": "high",
  "evidenceUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7bK1nQ9vX2mYt4LpR0sZaQ", "https://puppyacademy.example", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kx2fQ0aVQo"],
  "source": "primary",
  "notFound": false,
  "contentHash": "557a9ec6602c98069a3ef83a555005748d6267ceca608fa1026959c91277f446",
  "finishedAt": "2026-07-26T09:14:02.371Z"
}

How the fit score and contact confidence work

fitScore is a weighted 0-100 sum of three components, each printed in fitReasons:

• Audience reach — 30 points, by size band: nano (under 10k), micro (10k+), mid (100k+), macro (500k+), mega (1M+).
• Publishing activity — 20 points, full marks for weekly uploads, zero past a four-month gap.
• Niche match — 50 points: share of the keyword's terms found in the channel title, description and recent video titles, matched on whole words with inflections — "cat" never matches "catalogue".

A component with no data is not scored as zero; it drops out of the scale and its points are redistributed (hence 23/38 and 62/62 in the example). Scoring is deterministic.

contactConfidence ranks how directly you can reach the creator: high = email published on the channel, medium = a profile you can DM (Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook, LinkedIn) or an email from their site, low = some web presence but no DM route, none = neither. Rows with none, and notFound rows, are surfaced in the Alerts dataset view.

Input parameters

Run it from the Apify API, the CLI, or the Apify MCP server (mcp.apify.com), so an AI assistant can build a creator shortlist from a keyword.

How much does the YouTube Influencer Finder cost?

Pay-per-event billing: you pay per delivered row, never per keyword and never per request.

Minimum run budget: $0.025 — one run start plus one row at the Free-plan price.

You are never charged for cache hits (a channel fetched within 24 hours is re-delivered free, with its original finishedAt), for failures (no row, no charge), or for extra work inside a row — retries and backup paths are included in the per-row price. A notFound keyword is a delivered answer and is billed as one row. On Free accounts the run stops before the first paid request once the remaining balance drops under the minimum run budget.

YouTube Influencer Finder vs influencer platforms and manual research

What this actor does not do

• It does not send outreach — it produces the prospect list.
• It does not guess or unscramble obfuscated addresses — a guessed contact is the worst error here.
• It does not return private data — only what a channel and its linked business page publish.
• It does not report engagement rate, comment sentiment or sponsorship history in this version.
• It does not track creators over time — it is stateless; re-run it (about every 30 days).
• It does not page past the first search page (20 channels per keyword).

FAQ

How many channels do I get per keyword?

Up to 20 — one YouTube search page, counting both the channels returned directly and the creators behind the ranking videos, de-duplicated.

Will I get email addresses?

Usually not. Across live runs, no channel found for a niche keyword published one on its About tab, and YouTube hides the business address behind a captcha we do not touch. When an address is present it is returned with its source and an evidenceUrl; never guessed, never unscrambled. Plan outreach around the social profiles — that is what this actor reliably delivers.

Why is uploadCadenceDays null?

Cadence needs at least two dated uploads. When the channel page returns no publish labels, the field is null and the activity component is dropped from the score rather than scored as zero.

Do cache hits cost anything?

No. A channel fetched within the last 24 hours is re-delivered from cache and bills nothing beyond the run start.

Related actors

• YouTube Research Digest — transcripts and an AI digest of the top videos for a keyword, when you need what creators say, not who they are.
• Website Traffic Estimator — organic traffic for the creator websites you collect here, to size a placement before pitching.

Legal & support

• This actor collects public channel information: what a creator publishes on their own YouTube channel and on the website they link from it. It does not access private data, log-in-gated pages or personal profiles on other platforms, and it does not profile private individuals.
• Contact addresses are returned verbatim, with the URL they were read from — nothing guessed, de-obfuscated or inferred, so you can verify every address before using it.
• Business contact data is returned for B2B outreach; you remain responsible for using it in line with the marketing and privacy rules that apply to you (GDPR, CAN-SPAM, ePrivacy and local equivalents), including honouring opt-outs and identifying yourself as sender.
• Output is provided as-is for prospecting and market research; public statistics are point-in-time figures reported by the platform, not audited numbers.
• Questions or a bug? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab, or see the API tab.

SEO keywords

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