Google may finally be bringing some order to the messy world of influencer marketing thanks to a forgotten acquisition

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• Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai last week talked up
  FameBit — an under-the-radar influencer platform the company
  purchased in 2016.
• FameBit is now helping broker deals between YouTube
  talent and brands while taking a 10% cut of the
  deals.
• This has the potential of bringing order to the
  highly fragmented influencer marketing sector.
• It also put Google in an atypical role of servicing
  creative campaigns, something it’s historically been happy to
  cede to third parties.

Google is looking to bring some order to the chaos that is
influencer marketing.

Specifically, YouTube,
through its 2016 acquisition of the influencer-centric firm
Famebit, is connecting YouTube creators with brands, and
facilitating the creation of sponsored videos. The unit got a
rare brush with fame last week — a shoutout on Google’s
otherwise low key earnings call.

“Half of the creators that used FameBit in the first three
months of 2018, doubled their YouTube revenue,” said CEO Sundar
Pichai during
the call.

YouTube has historically shied away from this labor intensive,
service-oriented aspect of the business, leaving that to
multi-channel networks like Fullscreen or Maker Studios (which
eventually sold to Disney), talent rep firms and a host of ad
agencies, PR shops, and influencer
database startups.

But in the past few months, via FameBit, Google has
increasingly been playing matchmaker with …

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