Deposits, Not Impressions
A case study in running a creator-marketing desk like an engineer: how I managed an influencer media-buying agency, made audience verification a precondition for every deal, measured everything in verified deposits, and built the tooling the desk needed.
Status: The agency (SkinBet Agency) operated from 2024 to 2026, until I moved to building 21Core full time. Client names and commercial terms are withheld.
The proposition: the "verified streamer"
Performance creator marketing has a trust problem in both directions. Brands get burned by creators with manufactured audiences; honest creators get lumped in with the fraud and squeezed on terms.
The agency's answer was a single promise: every creator we put in front of a brand has passed a fraud check, and every deal is reported in verified deposits, not reach. Impressions are an input someone else can fake; a deposit is an outcome on the brand's own books.
That one constraint shaped the entire desk.
How the desk ran
Sourcing. I come from the player side of this scene, CS2 native, fluent in where its creators actually live (Twitch, Kick, YouTube, Telegram, Discord). Sourcing wasn't a list purchase; it was knowing which channels players actually trust, and why.
Vetting. Every candidate channel went through the fraud pipeline I built for exactly this purpose: a 0 to 100 score over follower-ratio, engagement and growth-velocity signals, screening tens of thousands of profiles per session. Clear fails never reached a brand. The full story of that system is its own case study: Scoring 75,000 profiles a session.
Budgets. I managed the monthly spend across partners, with a single partner running at €3k a month.
Deal structure. CPA, revenue share, or hybrid, chosen per creator based on what the vetting data supported. A creator whose audience quality was proven could carry performance terms; unproven channels didn't get funded on hope.
Measurement. Deals were tracked to deposit-level outcomes with promo-code and link attribution. Reports to brands showed the arithmetic (spend on one side, verified player value on the other) so a campaign decision never rested on a screenshot of a view counter.
What running the desk taught me
- The only honest metric is the one the counterparty can't manufacture. Everything upstream of the brand's own ledger is negotiable fiction.
- Verification changes the negotiation. When you can show a creator their audience is real (or isn't), pricing conversations get shorter and more honest on both sides.
- Fraud is a moving target. The vetting rules that worked in month one were partially gamed by month six; re-validation had to be routine, not incident response.
The tooling behind the desk
The desk's tooling outgrew the desk:
- StreamRadar Pro, the vetting pipeline, built out as internal tooling for the desk rather than sold on.
- The decision layer around it: creator scores, ROI-ranked deal estimates and GEO-confidence checks. Weak evidence was marked as weak instead of being turned into a confident recommendation.
What this demonstrates
- The full affiliate cycle, owned personally: sourcing, vetting, negotiation, campaign management, attribution, reporting.
- A measurable trust edge: verification-before-spend as the product, not a slogan.
- Builder range: when the desk needed tooling that did not exist, I built it and used it in the same commercial process I managed.
Related: Scoring 75,000 profiles a session: the fraud engine behind the desk · How I built 21Core around prediction markets