“Everyone will come to me — hey, we should work with this person, they have a million followers. I don't care. Followers means nothing to me… Why am I going to pay for a million followers when only a thousand people saw it?”
App Marketing by App Masters · September 2026
Castillo runs growth for the calorie-tracking app Cal AI and calls this one of the company's contrarian takes. He buys on average views per video rather than audience size, and says the arbitrage is in creators going viral from brand-new accounts who haven't yet learned to charge influencer rates. Brands that price on followers, he argues, are paying for people who never watched the video.
Transcript
Yeah. So influencer, these are the people that everyone knows about. That's your Alex Earl, Alex Cooper, Mr. Beast, et cetera. So these are people that have existing followings and like established brand pages, right? And if you go to them, they're not going to create every video that they post is going to integrate your brand. Like that's not going to happen. They may do like one video a month for you, two videos a month for you. It's like that's an influencer. And what you're really paying for with the influencer is the audience that they have amassed over the years of their posting content and the trust they've built with that audience. So that's an influencer. We all know influencers. A UGC creator, none of you guys know any UGC creators because if they were a famous UGC creator, they would be an influencer. So a UGC creator, it looks like just a regular person that's creating like just a random video and telling their story. And it's a brand new account dedicated to your product, right? That's the Jake.tracks. And like every video that I'm creating is a Cal AI video. And I have no existing audience. I maybe have like 10 followers and my video just pops up as people are scrolling. Like no one's following me, but my video pops up as people are scrolling through their For You page. And it'll just like, and that's why you got to play the algorithmic game and hope that your video is viral and hits their algo.
I can go forever with you, Jake. So you just stop me. But is there a minimum follower count that you see for influencers?
Yeah. So this is like one of like the Cal AI like contrarian takes is we don't care about followers. I like everyone will come to me like managers, people like within the company, like, hey, like, oh, we should work with this person. They have a million followers. Like, I don't care. Followers means nothing to me. What matters is how many views they get on average per video. Because let's say there's a creator that has a million followers, but gets a thousand views per video. So it's not like if he posted a video for Cal AI, he's not speaking to his million followers. He's speaking to the thousand people that watched his video. So like, why am I going to pay for a million followers when only a thousand people saw it? And vice versa. There are creators and like these are the ones you want to work with where they are already successful, but time just hasn't caught up yet because like they're averaging a million views a video, but they only have like 500 followers because they're a brand new account and they're just going mega viral and resonating with people really strongly. Like those are the people like, you know, brands, because like every brand is paying based on followers. So it's like, if you can find those creators that don't have high followings, but get a crazy high views, they are not used to getting like crazy exorbitant fees for brand deals. So you can come in and offer. them a reasonable rate and they'll love it because they've never seen anything like that whereas like if you're working with you know the biggest influencers in the world they're used to getting these stupid rates because brands are paying based on following not based on views
i see i love that i love the contrarian views so how are there any tools that you like to use and i like i have a few that i can point out too but that show the average views are you just looking at now point out i love i'm a big an fl fan and so i follow this meme account but are you just looking at the average views yep or yeah so what i
do i look at what i call the worst case scenario average view so i'm looking at like they're like let's say if we're looking at the 20 there are 20 recently posted videos okay i'm looking at the like the 10 worst performing videos or the five worst performing of those 20 and like of those five worst performing what's the average there and then that's what i'm basing my cpm on because if i base it on the worst case scenario it's unlikely that like say they do four videos for us in the deal it's unlikely that all four of those videos are going to be the worst performing ones they're actually they're likely going to be you know more closer to the mean and if that's the case then everything after that's profit so that that's how i do it so like looking at this i would say like their worst case scenario is probably like a million views yeah
i mean they're pretty good dude like the word i saw was maybe 500 000 right here but yeah and