How to vet influencers with SocialBlade growth data

ParseBird·14 Oct 2026

Key Takeaways

What does SocialBlade data add to influencer vetting? SocialBlade tracks creator statistics daily, so it shows growth over time rather than a single follower count. That history is what separates organic growth from a one-off viral hit or a suspicious overnight jump.

Which platforms does the SocialBlade Scraper cover? YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, and Facebook. You can look up creators by username, handle, channel ID, or SocialBlade URL, search by name, or pull SocialBlade's top 100 rankings.

What growth windows are included? For each metric, growth over 1, 3, 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 days plus year to date, along with up to 30 days of daily history rows.

How much does it cost to scrape SocialBlade? About $1.99 per 1,000 creator results on Apify's free plan at the time of writing, plus about $0.99 per 1,000 for additional data such as history, with lower prices on paid plans.

Why follower counts are not enough for influencer vetting

Influencer marketing teams, creator agencies, and brand partnership managers usually shortlist creators on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram by follower or subscriber count. But a count is a snapshot. It cannot tell you whether a channel is growing, stalling, or shrinking, and it cannot flag a sudden jump of 50,000 followers in a day.

SocialBlade records creator statistics every day. The SocialBlade Scraper returns that record as structured data, so vetting a list of 200 creators becomes one run instead of 200 browser tabs.

Vetting question	SocialBlade field
Is this creator still growing?	`growth` over 30, 90, and 365 days
Did they have one viral spike or steady growth?	`history` (daily rows)
Is their audience engaged? (Instagram)	`engagementRate`, `averageLikes`, `averageComments`
How do they rank in their niche?	`ranks`, `grade`
Where are they based?	`country`

Can SocialBlade detect fake followers? Not directly. But daily history makes suspicious patterns visible: a large one-day jump with no matching rise in views or likes, followed by flat growth, is worth a manual check before paying a creator.

How to scrape SocialBlade profiles in bulk

Pass a list of usernames and a platform. The default platform is YouTube.

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("parsebird/socialblade-scraper").call(run_input={
    "profiles": ["mrbeast", "veritasium", "kurzgesagt"],
    "platform": "youtube",
    "includeHistory": True,
    "historyDays": 30,
    "includeGrowth": True,
    "maxItems": 50,
})
creators = client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).list_items().items

You can also mix platforms in one run by passing SocialBlade URLs in startUrls, for example /tiktok/user/<name>, /instagram/user/<name>, or /twitch/user/<name>.

Input	What it does
`profiles`	Usernames, handles, or YouTube channel IDs for the chosen `platform`
`startUrls`	SocialBlade profile or ranking URLs, any platform
`searchQueries`	Find creators by name, about 5 matches per query
`includeHistory` / `historyDays`	Daily history rows, 2 to 30 days
`includeGrowth`	Growth windows from 1 day to 365 days and YTD
`rankingPlatform`, `rankingMetric`	Pull a SocialBlade top 100 list

What if I only know the creator's name, not their handle? Use searchQueries. Each query returns about five matching creators, and the identifierMismatch field flags cases where the profile found does not exactly match what you asked for.

Pulling SocialBlade top 100 rankings by niche

To discover creators rather than vet a known list, use the ranking inputs. For YouTube you can filter by country and category:

{
  "rankingPlatform": "youtube",
  "rankingMetric": "subscribers",
  "rankingCountry": "DE",
  "rankingCategory": "education",
  "rankingLimit": 100
}

Available ranking metrics by platform:

Platform	Ranking metrics
YouTube	subscribers, views, videos (plus country and category filters)
TikTok	followers, likes
Instagram	followers, posts
Twitch	followers
Facebook	likes, talking_about

Scoring creators by growth quality

A useful vetting score rewards consistent growth and penalizes growth that comes from a single day. Each history row has a date plus the platform's metrics (for YouTube: subscribers, views, videos), and primaryMetricName tells you which metric to read:

function growthQuality(creator) {
  const metric = creator.primaryMetricName; // e.g. "subscribers" or "followers"
  const days = creator.history ?? [];
  if (days.length < 7) return null;
  const gains = days.slice(1).map((d, i) => d[metric] - days[i][metric]);
  const total = gains.reduce((a, b) => a + b, 0);
  const biggestDay = Math.max(...gains);
  return {
    name: creator.displayName,
    total30d: total,
    spikeShare: total > 0 ? biggestDay / total : null,
    avgDailyChange: creator.historyGrowth?.avgDailyChange,
  };
}

On very large YouTube channels the public subscriber count is rounded, so daily history can show the same number for several days. For those channels, compare views growth instead.

A spikeShare close to 1 means almost all of a month's growth came from one day. That can be a genuine viral video, which you can confirm in the creator's upload history, or a bought boost. Either way it means the creator's typical growth rate is lower than the 30-day total suggests.

Which SocialBlade metric matters most for sponsorships? For sponsorships, recent growth and engagement usually matter more than total size. A creator with 80,000 followers, steady 30-day growth, and high average comments (Instagram reports averageComments) is often a better buy than one with 800,000 followers and flat or negative 90-day growth.

Combining SocialBlade with platform-native data

SocialBlade gives the growth curve. Platform scrapers give the content. A practical vetting stack:

Shortlist with SocialBlade rankings or a name search.
Vet growth with 30-day history and the 90-day and 365-day growth windows.
Review content with the platform's own data. For Twitch creators, see how to scrape Twitch and Kick for creator research.
Check community size and activity off-platform with the Discord community research guide.

FAQ

Is SocialBlade data accurate? SocialBlade reports what each platform publicly shows, recorded daily. Counts are rounded where platforms round them (YouTube abbreviates subscriber counts publicly), so treat small daily changes on large channels as approximate.

Can I track a creator's growth for longer than 30 days? The history input covers up to 30 days per run, and growth windows go up to 365 days. For a longer daily series, schedule the actor weekly and store each run's history.

Is it legal to scrape SocialBlade? The scraper reads public statistics pages. Check SocialBlade's terms and your local laws before commercial redistribution of the data.

Does it work for Instagram and TikTok creators, or only YouTube? All five supported platforms: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, and Facebook. Fields vary by platform. For example, talkingAbout only applies to Facebook pages, and engagementRate, averageLikes, and averageComments are Instagram fields.

Browse the Social Media category for more creator research tools.