This is the coolest concept we’ve heard about in a while. Well, at least in the last few months.
French startup Octoly wants to connect your fashion company or beauty brand to amateur Youtube vloggers. Why amateurs? Because you can’t afford the pros, who already work with large programming services such as Machinima.
The highest paid Youtuber, 25-year-old PewDiePie, has about 40 million subscribers and takes in about $12 million per year.
Several levels below PewDiePie are beauty vloggers who show kids hair and makeup tips. These are the young arbiters of style such as Olivia Palermo. So, those are the Youtubers with the top 1 percent in fan bases.
(Consult your teens about this … they never watch scheduled, conventional TV and wouldn’t know Michael Fassbender from Rainer Werner Fassbinder. But they are devoted to Youtubers, Vine stars and Tumblr bloggers you never heard of.)
Now, everyone who can afford a Red Epic camera is getting in on the game, and that’s where Octoly comes in.
Get your products mentioned by a few thousand amateur fashion Youtubers in LA, New York, Paris or London who collectively have a few million fans, and your apparel, beauty products and cosmetics start flying off the racks around the globe.
Or that’s the theory, at least.
And it seems to be a good theory.
Octoly just raised $1.2 million from a mix of VCs and angel investors, according to TechCrunch.
Octoly clients include Paris-based L’Oréal.
From the TechCrunch post:
Octoly monitors 800,000 channels worldwide and a million videos every day in order to identify new YouTubers and track existing creating partners.
The startup considers that there are around 400 active beauty YouTubers in France with a significant audience. Out of the top 400, 200 of them work with Octoly.
TechCrunch reports Octoly is launching in the United States, with 30 brands already signed. So this could be a rare example of a European startup beating the Americans at their own digital game.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.