Newsletter & Podcast Sponsor Lead Scorer

Score newsletter and podcast sponsor evidence as CRM-ready sponsorship leads with transparent fit reasons, risk flags, and outreach angles.

This Actor is intentionally ingest-first. It does not scrape the web, bypass logins, collect contacts, send outreach, or verify ad spend. Bring rows from existing Apify Actors, RSS exports, spreadsheets, CRM research, or manual collection.

Who It Is For

• Newsletter publishers researching relevant sponsor prospects.
• Podcast hosts and media sales teams prioritizing sponsor leads.
• Sponsorship agencies turning public-style evidence into CRM rows.
• Brands monitoring creator sponsorship activity from data they already collected.

Input

Required:

• mode: must be items.
• items: non-empty array of sponsor-evidence-like rows.

Optional:

• brandProfile: string or object describing the advertiser, product, service, or creator offer.
• targetAudience: audience terms to reward, such as SaaS founders or AI builders.
• targetCategories: category/niche terms to reward.
• excludedNiches: category or content terms to penalize.
• competitors: competitor or similar brand names for CRM review context.
• maxItems: default 500, maximum 5000.
• scrapedAt: ISO timestamp override for deterministic output.

Common row fields:

• Creator identity: creatorName, publicationName, showName, channelName
• Source: platform, sourceUrl, rssUrl, episodeUrl, postUrl, source
• Content: title, excerpt, text, description, transcriptSnippet
• Timing/category: publishDate, postedAt, category, tags, audienceHint
• Sponsor evidence: sponsorMentions, sponsorBrand, landingPage, offerText, couponCode

Output

Each output row is flat and deduped by creator, platform, and sponsor/source evidence:

• dedupeKey
• creatorName
• platform
• sourceUrl
• publishDate
• detectedSponsors
• sponsorEvidenceSnippets
• audienceFitScore
• commercialReadiness
• fitReasons
• sponsorFrequencyHint
• recommendedAction
• outreachAngle
• crmNote
• riskFlags
• warnings
• scrapedAt

Scoring

The score is deterministic and clamped to 0..100:

• direct sponsor evidence: +30
• commercial readiness hint: +20
• target audience or category fit: +25
• recent publish date: +10
• source URL present: +5
• excluded niche match: -15
• missing source URL: -10
• no direct sponsor evidence: -20

Labels:

• hot: 70..100
• warm: 40..69
• cold: below 40

Example Use Cases

• Score sponsor mentions from newsletter exports before importing into a CRM.
• Normalize podcast episode rows with sponsor arrays into one deduped lead list.
• Penalize excluded niches while preserving the evidence for human review.
• Generate evidence-led outreach angles without claiming verified budget, spend, contact data, or guaranteed conversion.

Local Development

npm install
npm test
node src/main.js --input ../../samples/sponsor-leads/newsletter-podcast-sponsor-lead-scorer-input.json --output ../../samples/sponsor-leads/newsletter-podcast-sponsor-lead-scorer-output.json
apify validate-schema

CLI Example

$node src/main.js --input input.json --output output.json

Minimal input:

{
  "mode": "items",
  "brandProfile": "AI workflow automation platform for B2B SaaS teams",
  "targetAudience": ["SaaS founders", "AI builders"],
  "targetCategories": ["AI", "SaaS"],
  "items": [
    {
      "publicationName": "AI Operator Weekly",
      "platform": "newsletter",
      "sourceUrl": "https://aioperator.example/p/sponsored",
      "publishDate": "2026-07-02",
      "excerpt": "Today's sponsor is OpsPilot. Use coupon BUILD20.",
      "audienceHint": "SaaS founders and AI builders",
      "sponsorMentions": "OpsPilot"
    }
  ]
}

Limitations

• v0.1 supports items mode only.
• It does not scrape arbitrary newsletters, podcast pages, YouTube, or paywalled sources.
• It does not collect private contact data or email addresses.
• It does not send outreach.
• It does not verify ad spend, budget authority, sponsorship pricing, or conversion likelihood.
• Treat the output as CRM review support, not as proof of a commercial relationship beyond the supplied evidence.