Ten years ago, if someone said to you, “Content creators for me were kind of the beacon of hope; they were the people I looked up to,” you’d pause for a second before asking, “What’s a content creator?” But social media, influencers, and content creation have now been around long enough for people to have grown up with them and, well, to have been influenced by them. Avery Schrader, the man who uttered those words above, is in his mid-20s and very much came of age in the social media era. And that influence on him was the driving force behind the founding of Modash in 2018. From the same interview:
A Canadian by birth, Schrader’s do-what-you-love ethos brought him to Germany, where he lived for a while and worked as a cook, and then eventually to Estonia, which may just be Europe’s Silicon Valley. This is where he met his eventual co-founder, Hendry Sadrak. The two of them started Modash with the ambition of making sure every creator who wanted to be paid for their work could get paid for their work. Both founders are under 30, and there might be no better demographic to launch an influencer marketing platform than theirs.
That would certainly help explain the duo’s success with Modash. Well, that and the fact they understood that in order to get creators paid, they’d need to attract brands with the ad budgets to pay them. Their platform may exist for creators, but it is very much a tool for the brands. The brands themselves have noticed. Airbnb, Victoria’s Secret, Mont Blanc, and some outfit called Google have all turned to Modash to find (and pay!) influencers for their campaigns. Meanwhile, Schrader and Sadrak are doing what they love. Sounds like everybody wins.
Modash OÜ:
Pricing
Like most SaaS platforms, Modash has multiple tiers of access, each one offering increasingly more features, and less limits on those features. Unlike other influencer platforms we’ve reviewed, they’ve added a limit to the number of “Search Pages” you can see each month: every time you run a search, a page of 15 results comes up. That’s 1 toward your limit. Want to see the next page? That’s 2. Don’t quite like the results so you refine it a little more? The next page is your third, and so on down the line. It’s a bit strange, but also the limits are high enough that they seem like a non-issue for all but the most inexperienced of marketers.
- Essentials, $120/mo ($99/mo if billed annually) — 1 user can view up to 900 search pages a month and view in-depth profiles of up to 250 influencers; unlimited influencer lists, but you can only export the details of up to 40 influencers on those lists; audience overlap tool; monitor up to 10 influencers in your campaigns.
- Pro, $299/mo ($249/mo if billed annually) — 5 users can view up to 3000 search pages; view 400 influencer profiles; bulk save influencers to any of their unlimited lists; export 200 influencers from those lists; audience overlap tool; monitor up to 100 influencers and export their campaign data; campaign alerts.
- Advanced, $899/mo ($800/mo if billed annually) — 10 users can view unlimited search pages; view 1500 influencer profiles a month; bulk save influencers to an unlimited number of lists; export 1000 influencers from those lists; audience overlap tool; monitor up to 400 influencers and export their campaign data; campaign alerts.
- Enterprise, starting at $1350/mo — Custom and/or unlimited everything, plus API connectivity (for an extra fee) to send influencer data to any other software platform
The Details
As a platform created with the good fortune of influencers in mind, it’s no surprise that Modash is heavily focused on their discovery and management. On the other side of campaigns, is the influencer monitoring that tells you how their posts are doing. In between these two things is campaign management, which is not part of the platform. We don’t say that as a criticism as it’s not the problem that the founders of Modash were looking to solve. Of course, if you’re going to build something toward a specific purpose, you’d better make sure you’re serving that purpose as best as possible. Modash does just that.
Their Discovery module is a great start. As part of the Modash commitment to make sure everyone who wants to earn money for their creativity can, they’ve amassed a database of every account on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok with more than 1,000 followers—more than 250 million people in all. With this in mind, you might be thinking back to those search page limits and wondering how you can stay within them. The platform doesn’t show you results every time you add a keyword or adjust a filter to refine your search. Instead, you just watch the number of influencers that match your criteria get narrowed down as you add more filters. When you’re down to a manageable number, you then hit the button to Show Influencers, and that’s when your first search page is counted against your total for the month.
As for the filters themselves, they’re pretty thorough and give you a number of ways to get to the content you’re looking for. If you want to find beauty influencers, for example, you can search it as an influencer interest (lots of content in the category would indicate this), as a topic (hashtagged posts), or as a keyword (the exact word must appear in the bio or captions/comments). You can also search by mentions, which has to be the obvious first search you do on Modash. Combine mentions of your brand with audience filters that match who your customers are and you’ll find some prospects who’d likely want to work with you.
At any point, you can click on an influencer in your list of results and an overlay slides in with more detailed information. The profile will show you their stats for the channel you searched (if you looked for Instagram influencers, you’re going to Instagram data), but you can always click on “Explore other Channels” to see their data on YouTube and/or TikTok. One very cool thing here—for large teams, especially—is that this more detailed view of the influencer will tell you if they’ve worked with your brand before and, if yes, which campaigns. This saves you the minor embarrassment at seeming like a disorganized company if you reach out to them like they’ve never worked with you before. It can also save you time on your research: just ask your co-worker whose campaign they participated in if they’re worth working with.
The more detailed view that pops up also gives you some other info that’s valuable upfront: like their fake follower percentage, and their engagement rate. We really like the way Modash handles engagement rate, because they give you context. Maybe a 5.4% engagement rate doesn’t sound so impressive, but when you see that similar sized accounts on the same social channel have a mean engagement rate of 2% that 5.4 suddenly looks a lot better. They do the same thing for the Fake Follower stat. You’ll also get more detailed stats on those engagements (likes, comments, Reel plays, etc.), as well as a quick glance at their bio and audience demographics. There’s also a breakdown of who makes up the audience: fake followers are one segment, but then you’ll also see how many of their followers are influencers themselves, how many are people who just mass follow everything, and—of course—how many are just real, regular people.
But there’s more: you’ll also see the audience's reachability, which is a measure of how many people their followers follow. Someone who’s following tens of thousands of accounts just isn’t as reachable as someone who’s following a couple hundred. The profile pane also tells you the audience’s topical interests, the influencers most used hashtags and mentions, and a brief tour of both their most popular content and any sponsored content they’ve done (provided they disclosed it was sponsored). Then there are the lookalikes: you can find influencers whose accounts are similarly sized in the same topic, and you can find influences whose audiences look like the one you’re viewing. And those influential followers that were included in the audience breakdown? You’re told exactly who they are. Finally, if all that looks good, you can look at the full report. Yes, what we’ve just described is not the full report, which contains more data and visualizations. Here is a good time to mention that Modash licenses their data to other influencer platforms to use, because it’s that good and so in-depth.
The rest of what Modash does continues this level of detail. The organization of influencers is done as part of the platform’s relationship management features. Organize influencers into lists, and you can attach labels, notes, and documents to each one. Through an integration with Gmail, you can send and receive emails directly to and from any influencer whose email you have (and Modash often, but not always, provides those emails). The conversations are all contained within the platform, and from any conversation with an influencer you can have that profile of theirs (with all the data we described in the last two paragraphs) slide right into the screen for added context. And, while Modash doesn’t have a full-fledged campaign management tool, you can note and track the status of your influencers—whether they’ve been invited, hired, were sent a product, submitted their content, and more. Finally, these lists also give you the unique reach of the group: shared audience members are only counted once and not added to the total so you can understand what the true reach of the group is.
When you have a campaign running, Modash can track the performance of the influencers (and the campaign as a whole), and it does a good job of reporting on the metrics—both as a group and as singular accomplishments by each influencer. If you launched a sales campaign, you can integrate with Shopify to track discount code usage, even creating the codes right from within Modash, which feeds it back to Shopify. And you can manually input how much business the influencer referred on your behalf and compare it to how much you paid them.
And speaking of payments: the whole reason Modash was created was “so creators could get paid to what they love,” so it would have been shocking if there weren’t some kind of payment mechanism here. Like many platforms, Modash uses an escrow system—you transfer your money to the platform, and they release the funds to the creator. We don’t love the process of adding a payment: it’s done one influencer at a time, with a few fields to fill out and a contract to upload. But we do love the fact that once you’ve added the new transaction, your part in the payment is done. Modash takes it from there, and works with the influencers to ensure they get their money, so you don’t have to worry about the management of hundreds, if not thousands, of different payment accounts to send to. Modash takes a 5% fee on top of what you owe an influencer, and as far as we’re concerned, the cost is worth the time savings.
Conclusion
Modash shines in its core functions: influencer discovery and management. The platform boasts an unparalleled influencer database, which is somehow very easily searchable despite a vast array of criteria to refine results with. Detailed profiles provide a wealth of information, from engagement rates and audience demographics to brand mentions and sponsored content history. These insights are deep, and making data-driven decisions has never been more accessible to smaller brands.
While campaign management isn't directly offered, Modash compensates with its reporting and payment features. The platform facilitates secure influencer payments without you getting bogged down in the details of bank account routing numbers, Venmo, PayPal, or any of the dozen different ways we can send money across the wire these days. With a focus on both influencer success and campaign efficiency, Modash is a compelling solution for brands and creators alike.
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