New Tracking Tool To Identify YouTube Stars Before They Get Big

At today’s Digitas Newfronts presentation, the leading digital ad agency announced a partnership with Outrigger Media, which runs the OpenSlate statistics platform. Together, the two companies will create the Emerging Talent Tracker, which seeks to identify talented and commercially viable YouTube creators before they score millions of subscribers.

The Emerging Talent Tracker will take advantage of OpenSlate’s unique metric, the SlateScore, which uses social media data to analyze how well a channel interacts with its audience, spitting out an easily-digestible number between 1 and 1000. Therefore, OpenSlate can identify creators who may not have huge subscriber counts, but still engage their fans in a big way. Presenters at the Digitas presentation gave fashion vlogger BeautyBitten as an example; though she has just 16,000 subscribers, her high-quality videos get consistent views and do well to engage the audience.

“Our partnership with Digitas is exciting because we’re developing a product that has both immediate value and long term potential,” said Outrigger CEO Mike Henry. “The Emerging Talent Tracker will help Digitas and their clients find and engage content producers on a very granular level, and in a more nascent stage of development.”

The Emerging Talent Tracker will launch in June 2012, when it will become available to Digitas’ clients. If it is truly able to find the ‘next big thing’, then hungry advertisers will soon be flush with hyper-specific data, with brand lift likely to follow.