Influencer Advisory™

How does Ridge Wallet's influencer marketing work?

Ridge Wallet influencer marketing means fewer, deeper creator deals with ad rights in each one, then running those videos as ads and reading two measures.

Dennis Ksendzov
Dennis KsendzovVerified

Founder · November 10, 2026 · 3 min read

Stop sponsoring thousands of creators one-off, and shift budget into fewer, deeper integrations, like Ridge does. Those videos return noticeably higher than the old one-offs.

On the paid side, Ridge has gone deliberately in the other direction on volume. They have worked with around five thousand YouTube creators over the years, and they are now trying to do fewer and far better deals, with roughly three hundred creators a year and around twenty videos with a single creator like MKBHD, all of them high touch, all of them integrated, and all of them including the ad rights and the whitelisting so that the content keeps working long after the video stops trending.

How does Ridge Wallet decide which creators to sponsor?

Find unsponsored accounts and pay for the right audience.

  • Ridge set out to be every creator's first sponsor, so it hunted new YouTube accounts with 10,000 subscribers and no brand deal yet.
  • Most gifted posts can't run as ads. Ridge gets maybe 2 good ones from 100 wallets. The biggest names are already signed by bigger sponsors.
  • A brand Ridge's size only needs a roster of 30 to 50 UGC creators; 100 is too many to keep in consistent work.
  • Ridge's best sponsorship was Smarter Every Day, where two bullets collide with the wallet in shot: 20 million views and over half a million in sales. Ridge pays much more per view there because the audience skews older and more affluent. (Marketing Operators)

Once you have the right creators, write the right to use their videos into the deal.

How does Ridge run creator videos as ads?

Write ad rights into the deal, then read results in the paid account.

  • Ridge gets almost no organic purchases from creator deals, just good impressions and good CPMs. Nearly all the performance shows up in the paid account.
  • Why the ads pay back: at Ridge, affiliate videos run as ads at 15% lower cost per view and twice the click rate.
  • Ridge expects as much as half of its Q4 spend to run through partner ads, because Meta gets better signal when there are two handles on the creative.

Ridge had JerryRig Everything, who has 10 million plus subscribers, gold plate a Cybertruck, and got the cars into about 15 YouTubers' videos. (Connor)

What we found the previous year was that if we can get the trucks [the prize] in the videos, they perform about twice as well.

Then decide before the video goes live which number will say the deal worked.

How does Ridge know a creator deal worked?

Use two measures and keep YouTube in its own ad account.

  • Ridge counts a score of 0.4 to 0.5 in Northbeam as winning for a YouTube creator. It does not check much against codes anymore, because it worries they leak and the number gets blurry.
  • Ridge runs YouTube in a completely separate Google account so search and shopping cannot steal the attribution.
  • Ridge once made new ads beat its old ones by 20% before it would fund them. What fixed it: A new creator is worth it at the same cost per buyer, because it adds buyers the old ads can't reach.
  • Ridge re-ups a podcast buy only when it beats target in both Podscribe and the post-purchase survey. (Marketing Operators)
We have two columns, and we say if something is above our target from Podscribe or above our target from the post-purchase, we'll weight those. And if it wins in both, we'll re-up with that buy.

Set both targets first, so the renewal call is a plain yes or no.

More on this:

Who can run a creator program like this for my brand?

Sourcing, ad rights, testing and measuring add up to a team's work, and we do that work for brands.

Put ad money behind the creator content that already works.

If you have some of the steps in place, we audit what's missing in each and how to take it further.