Treating creators like a media channel

At YoCreate we build for the other approachMost brands still buy influencer marketing the way they bought billboards in the nineties. They pick a face, pay a fee and hope the post lands. The report that follows counts likes and impressions, and nobody in the finance department quite believes it. At YoCreate, a Limassol company, we build for the other approach, where a creator’s video is judged like any other paid channel. We run two products: YoCreate, an influencer marketing platform for brands, and YoTrends, a trend discovery tool for creators. YoCreate YoCreate is an influencer marketing platform for brands. A marketing team uses it to find creators by niche, country and audience, send briefs, sign contracts, pay creators and track campaign results in one place, instead of juggling spreadsheets, DMs and bank transfers. Brands can run campaigns on the platform themselves or hand them to our in-house team. The team handles casting, negotiation and execution on the same platform, and the client sees every step. Payments are where influencer marketing usually gets messy. Paying creators in dozens of countries, with contracts and tax documents that hold up, can take longer than the campaign itself. YoCreate handles that part, so a brand in Cyprus can work with a creator in Mexico or Malaysia without a legal project on the side. Results are measured the way a performance team measures paid media: cost per install, cost per order, return on ad spend. Clients include inDrive, Exness, PepsiCo, Nebius and Higgsfield, mostly from categories where every new user is tracked to the cent, such as fintech, gaming, streaming and AI products. For Nebius, a single campaign delivered 360 per cent return on marketing investment. This year we added YoCreate Performance, which turns creator content into user-generated content ads and runs them as paid media, including through creators’ own accounts via TikTok Spark Ads. YoTrends YoTrends is a tool for creators who want to make content people are already watching. You pick your country and niche, and it shows what’s trending on YouTube and TikTok right now: the videos, sounds and formats gaining views fastest this week. Then it turns those trends into video ideas for your own channel, with hooks and scripts you can adapt and shoot the same day. The problem it solves is timing. Most creators notice a trend once it’s already in their feed, and by then the people who started it have collected the views. YoTrends tracks millions of videos in real time and flags the ones picking up speed early, so you can join a trend while it’s still rising. It covers nine markets, from the US and Japan to Saudi Arabia and South Korea. Creators can also see who in their niche keeps hitting trending and study what those videos have in common. Brands and agencies use the same view to shortlist creators whose content is working right now. More than 5,000 creators use YoTrends, and it’s free to start. It also connects to AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT, so a creator can ask what’s trending in their niche today and get a script written from live data in the same chat. Built in Limassol Our headquarters is in Limassol, with team members in London, Berlin, Dubai, Manila, Almaty and a few other cities. Limassol has quietly become a hub for the kind of companies we serve, and the time zone lets one team cover Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia in a working day. The creator economy is usually described as a marketing trend. From where we sit it looks more like a media channel that is still priced wrong. Brands that measure it properly buy attention cheaper than their competitors, and we’d like more of them to be based here. Ruslan Kurmanaev is the founder and CEO of Zantemark Limited, the company behind YoCreate and YoTrends. yocreate.com and yotrends.ai https://www.linkedin.com/company/yoocreate