HypeAuditor

How We Collect and Analyze Influencer Data

All data in this report is provided by HypeAuditor, an all-in-one influencer marketing platform trusted by over 1,500 brands and agencies worldwide. Our goal is to offer accurate, up-to-date, and fraud-resistant data so marketers can confidently choose their influencer partners.

HypeAuditor has been recognized with multiple industry awards from G2, including Leader in Mid-Market, Small Business, and Enterprise market sectors, as well as the Inc. Power Partner Award, which highlights our support for entrepreneurs and growing startups. We’re also a verified data provider for Statista, which further confirms that our analytics meet high industry standards.

Data volume and history

We have been continuously gathering influencer data since February 5, 2018. Today, we cover over 207.2M million accounts across major social media platforms: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, and Snapchat. This scale allows us to provide statistically reliable metrics, detecttrends, and model estimates.

Where the data comes from

We collect publicly available information from open sources and publicly visible content. This includes:

  • Profile link, full name, avatar, language, biography, location (country/city/state), brand and common interests, notable engaged users, sponsored posts,
  • Email and social network profile.
  • Images, graphics, photos, profiles, audio and video clips, sounds, musical works, liaisons with audience, texts of the comments, works of authorship, applications, links and other content or materials from social network profiles.

Since creators provide their data to social networks, this data is considered publicly available in accordance with GDPR Art. 14(1)(c). We have a legitimate interest in using the data made available by creators via social networks for direct marketing purposes (GDPR Recital 47) without affecting their fundamental rights and freedoms. We do not access private data such as DMs or insights from influencer accounts.

Furthermore, these reports are entirely unbiased and aren’t anyhow influenced by promotional placements or paid collaborations. They are automatically generated and updated based on real-world data and statistical modeling.

How we process the data

Once collected, the data goes through several detailed processes before it shows up in our reports. This stage is necessary, since it’s where raw data is cleaned, verified, and structured to ensure accuracy and consistency. By carefully processing the data, we make sure that every insight you see is backed by reliable information you can actually use to make confident decisions.

Here’s how we do it:

1. AI-powered fraud detection

At the core of our analytics engine is an array of AI-powered algorithms that we built from the ground up and have since honed to deliver the most reliable estimates and proprietary metrics that enable marketers to make faster decisions.

We detect and filter out:

  • Suspicious followers and low-quality accounts (e.g., mass followers)
  • Automated (bot-driven) interactions
  • Comment pods and like-for-like behavior
  • Sudden, non-organic growth spikes

2. Metric normalization & validation

Influencer metrics can vary a lot depending on geography, platform, or niche. What counts as strong engagement in one region might be average elsewhere. Without normalization, it's difficult to compare creators in a fair and meaningful way.

To ensure accuracy across geographies and niches, we normalize the data by considering:

  • Platform-specific engagement benchmarks
  • Seasonal posting behaviors
  • Account size (e.g., micro vs. macro influencers)

We also compare every metric against similar influencers to provide a fair assessment.

3. Audience Quality Score

To evaluate how trustworthy and engaged a creator’s audience is, we apply our proprietary Audience Quality Score (AQS), a unique technology developed by HypeAuditor. AQS processes large amounts of publicly available data and applies sophisticated machine learning algorithms to assess:

  • Audience quality
  • Engagement authenticity
  • Demographic alignment

Overall, our algorithms take into account and use more than 50 patterns to detect suspicious accounts, which allows us to detect 95.5% of all known fraud activity with a mean error rate of 0.73%.

How often do we update data?

Influencer reports typically refresh every week. However, highly active creators might see updates more frequently. Regular updates ensure:

  • Follower changes and engagement drops/spikes are reflected promptly
  • Immediate tracking of campaign-related activities
  • Rankings remain up-to-date and relevant

If a creator hasn’t posted in a while or has low public activity, updates may occur less frequently to maintain accuracy and efficiency.

Our data correction policy

We strive to ensure that all data we provide is accurate, up-to-date, and reliable. However, if you notice any inaccuracies or discrepancies, we’ll be happy to review and correct them.

If you believe that any data is incorrect, please contact us at dpo@hypeauditor.com with the details. Our team will verify the information and make updates where necessary.

Why We Created These Influencer Reports

A rising demand for influencer data

The influencer marketing industry has grown quickly and brought exciting opportunities, but it has also introduced new challenges. Influencer marketing now has established its place among other digital marketing channels, but for many brands and agencies, it’s still difficult to answer these basic but important questions:

  • Is this influencer’s audience real and actually engaged?
  • Are the metrics trustworthy or inflated by bots and fake followers?
  • How can we fairly compare creators from different platforms, countries, and niches in a consistent way?

HypeAuditor’s commitment to transparency and trust

At HypeAuditor, we recognized these issues early and decided to help solve them—not just for our clients, but for the influencer marketing industry as a whole. We believe in bringing transparency and trust into the creator economy, and these influencer reports are part of our ongoing contribution toward a more credible industry. Eventually, this belief grew into our company mission.

How HypeAuditor’s influencer reports help marketers

With our reports, marketers gain clear, accurate, and meaningful insights that reach far beyond vanity metrics like follower counts. The goal of our analytical reports is to help anyone:

  • Be more confident in deciding who to partner with
  • Avoid spending on low-impact creators
  • Benchmark performance across regions, niches, and platforms
  • Spot early signs of growth, burnout, or audience fatigue
  • And even justify influencer campaign budgets to their stakeholders

Reports built for real marketing needs

We don’t create these reports to simply boost search rankings or showcase inflated numbers. Instead, they’re thoughtfully built by marketers for real marketing teams. For anyone who has spent hours manually vetting influencer accounts, struggling to evaluate campaign ROI, or doubting the credibility of an influencer’s numbers, provide the answers they need.

Accessible data for anyone

Since our reports are freely available online, even small marketing teams with limited budgets can run smart campaigns based on the data gathered, compiled, and organized by HypeAuditor. By using these reports, everyone gets access to real-time, fraud-checked, comparable analytics that help them work smarter, not harder, in influencer marketing.

Who creates the reports?

Our reports are developed by the HypeAuditor Analytics Team, which consists of data scientists, machine learning engineers, and influencer marketing experts. The team constantly refines the detection models and benchmarks using billions of data points from major social networks. The platform has also received multiple G2 awards, including Leader for EMEA and Europe in 2024.

Here are a few key members of the team behind our reports:

Tim Bondarenko, Chief Technology Officer, oversees the development of the analytics infrastructure. He has a rich technical background, having spoken at major international tech events, including the OpenStack Summit in Paris (2014) and Sydney (2017), as well as HUAWEI CONNECT in Shanghai (2018). Tim’s work ensures our systems stay fast, scalable, reliable, and technically robust.

Mikhail Korotkov, AI Engineer, leads the development of the machine learning (ML) models that’s under the hood of HypeAuditor’s analytical engine. With more than seven years of experience in B2B analytics, he focuses on advanced ML techniques, multimodal embeddings, vector search, and LLMs. Mikhail has spent the last five years at HypeAuditor building the core AI models behind the reports. He publishes his findings on Medium.

Nick Baklanov, Marketing Intelligence Analyst, works on the data interpretation side. His insights on influencer marketing have been featured in the likes of Forbes, Social Media Today, Business Insider, El País, and Wired. He also contributes to industry discussions at events and roundtables. Always at the forefront of the space, Nick helps us pressure-test our analytics by putting them up against what’s really happening in practice. This keeps our reports accurate and useful.

Bringing all these efforts together is Alexander Frolov, CEO and Founder of HypeAuditor. He has united the technical, analytical, and industry expertise within the company to build a platform focused on transparency and accuracy in influencer marketing. Having combined deep technical knowledge with a strong understanding of the industry, he regularly speaks at global conferences, with the most recent being SocialDay and Zilele Biz.