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Yemi Oyepeju

Why Are Influencer Deals Still Stuck in DMs and Ghosting in 2025?

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As founders, we automate ads, analytics, and customer support… yet influencer marketing still feels like sending carrier pigeons.

You reach out to a creator. They might reply… or vanish for weeks. Negotiations happen in messy email threads, rates are all over the place, and deals fall apart because there’s no structure or urgency.

It blows my mind that in 2025, we’re still dealing with influencer partnerships like it’s 2015.

• Has anyone here figured out a more streamlined way to work with creators, especially on YouTube?

• Are brands willing to embrace more transparent pricing or structured marketplaces?

• Or is the chaos just baked into influencer marketing for the foreseeable future?

Curious how other founders are handling this. Have you built your own systems, or found platforms that make creator deals smoother and faster?

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Sean Howell
I keep seeing platforms being launched in this space but the issue seems to be a disconnect from the purchaser expectations, influencer reliability, and enough scale. The largest influencer deals happen through agencies. The big opportunity is probably what I fear the most: a million micro influencers pushing the same product at once—inescapability.
Yemi Oyepeju
Launching soon!

@howell4change Exactly and why there's the need for transparency. The market sets the price like the law of demand and supply which is why we've implemented so many features to evaluate creators' integrity, reliability and clout authority.

BidVid is a unique marketplace in several ways, for example, after a creator completes a transaction with a brand, there's a 3 day delay before brand can leave review for the creator so the brand would have enough time to evaluate the quality and result of the collaboration, even if that comes at a risk for creators to accumulate fewer reviews as some brands may forget to return to drop a review. We would prefer a creator have as few as 10 real, quality reviews on our platform than 50 reviews that seem forced from some brands.

Likewise on a creator's auction page, brands have several data points and YouTube metrics to assess a creator with. All this happens in the open rather than working with a middle man (agency) who does the behind-the-scene things that would likely take longer to secure a deal.

Check us out if interested, we have just released beta to the public ahead of our main launch: https://bidvid.io