Why is proving identity crucial for creators and developers?

The creator’s quest to prove identity

A creator's identity is currently limited to the silos of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms where they engage with their audience the most. They have little to no identity outside of those platforms and their audiences are also kind of restrained on these platforms. It’s hard for creators to prove their identities and reputation beyond the specific platforms.

Mediums such as YouTube, TikTok, and others serve as a system of record for a creator, storing all of their identity information. They may need to translate this identity outside of this medium at times.

As an example, assume a restaurant critic visits a restaurant that provides discounts to influencers. How does he prove his influence? As is standard procedure, he manually shows them the channel or profile he manages and claims it as his account.

Consider more formal scenarios in which creators require financial services or want to prove their identities to brands in order to secure better deals.

Creators want to break down these platform barriers and use their hard-earned reputation as part of their identity.

The developer’s quest to prove identity

Developers building products and services for the creator economy have a huge problem in verifying creator identity. The current practice of confirming identities and other metrics across platforms through screenshots, series of emails, and phone calls is too tedious and time-consuming.

Even after the snapshots are shared, there are trust barriers - has the creator photoshopped it, or faked data in any way? There’s no trusted way of telling.

Developers want a simple solution that allows them to quickly and easily verify a large pool of creators, across various creator platforms, so that they can go to market as soon as possible.

I Link, Therefore I Am - know more about Phyllo’s Identity API

The identity and reputation of a creator already exist on the platform where they are most active. At Phyllo, we provide a consented data pipe for creators to authenticate and prove they are who they claim to be and choose to provide access to their data to any developer for validation.

Using Phyllo’s native authorization, developers can provide a way to let users connect and grant access to their data from within the developer app itself. Once granted, developers can use our REST APIs to retrieve information about a creator's identity, income, and engagement on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, OpenSea, Discord, Shopify, Substack, and so many others.

Using Phyllo’s Identity API, you can get access to a creator’s profile information, which includes name, username, permalink to their profile, date of birth, phone number, etc. depending on the kind of information different source platforms offer. It makes it easier for creators on the developer’s platform to manage their digital identities.

Benefits of using this approach: It’s clean, automatic, and super-fast!

Phyllo gets you the creator’s first-party data directly from the source platform. The data comes with the creator’s consent that they provide after logging into the platform and it's also useful for developers because the source of the data is automatically verified.

This gives creators complete control over what data they share, and it's also useful for developers because the source of the data is automatically verified.

How businesses and developers are using our Identity API

Influencer Marketing

Brands want to invest in creators that are right for them. They also want to ensure that they are dealing with the trusted creator and not an impersonator or a fraud, and the onus of verification falls on the influencer marketing platform. Most of this verification is done manually, which is a resource and time-intensive task. With Phyllo, this problem gets resolved with a single sign-on.

Phyllo’s Identity API provides creators’ profile-level information such as their followers, following, subscribers, and other reputation metrics. It also provides audience demographics data (gender, age distribution, location, etc.) to determine how valuable a creator is to the brands.

All this information comes with the creator’s consent and directly from the source platform.

Creator Tools

This is where a creator builds a platform to earn money from fans. Now, these fans know the creator on some other medium - like YouTube, Instagram, etc. and are coming to this platform to buy courses/merchandise from the creator, tip the creator, etc.

However, these platforms face a significant identity problem because fans will have no way of knowing that the platform belongs to the original creator and not some fraudulent entity trying to pose as the creator. There is no linkage between the creator identities on the two platforms. With Phyllo’s data pipe, this issue gets addressed.

Fintech

Fintechs must ensure that the right creator benefits from their financial services such as credit cards, insurance, and loans before they can offer them to creators.

The standard wage slip or other paperwork required by banks is not available to the creators. To get a loan or insurance, the only proof they have to show is the number of followers they have and the amount of engagement they get on their posts. Banks must ensure that the engagement shown is for the creator's own work, not for someone else’s.

Again, Phyllo's data pipe is critical in this case to authenticate the person’s identity.

Web3

Creators are releasing NFTs and tokens on web3 platforms, and fans are familiar with these creators from web2 platforms.

Verifying NFT creators' web2 reputations and social identities ensure that fans are purchasing from the artists they love and follow, rather than a fake individual impersonating the creator.

Verifying identity also helps prove NFT ownership to get access to NFT-based membership DAOs or promotions.

➡️ To learn more about how Phyllo can empower your business with creator data, please schedule a call with us.

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