What Is an Affinity Score? (and how SparkToro calculates it)

What SparkToro's affinity score means, why it's logarithmic, and how to use it to prioritize the sources of influence that matter most to your audience.

Central to SparkToro's audience research product is this score right here. It's called affinity. And affinity essentially tells you the relationship, the relative relationship between an audience that you've described and a source of influence.

You can see the score on the overview page for websites. You can see it for social accounts, for AI prompt topics and keywords. If you dig into the YouTube or podcast data, you'll see affinity scores there as well.

The affinity scores are not, precisely comparable across different dimensions. So inside of YouTube, for example, we are saying that MJ's off the hook designs, this crochet designer is extremely popular. The highest level of popularity that an audience can have with a source of influence in YouTube.

That's gonna be different when you go to the websites section. And we're not saying, for example, affinity does not tell you that one hundred percent of all knitters are following that particular YouTuber nor are we saying that eighty percent are visiting ravelry dot com. What we are saying with affinity is when scored from most to least, this particular YouTube channel is at the most and ravelry dot com is at an eighty.

This score is logarithmic, not linearly scored. So an eighty is considerably higher than a seventy, which is considerably higher than a sixty. You can also see the history of affinity scores in any of these.

And if you'd like, you can see bubble charting for this as well. So the option is yours. When you click on any particular one like eat, sleep, knit, we will show you that this has had a trajectory over time of growth and slippage with this particular audience, which means that the domain or the source of influence has fluctuated.

You can see what those are over time. You can, of course, export this data as well. Affinity score is found throughout SparkToro, and it's one of the most useful metrics that we've got to tell you whether you should prioritize one particular source over another.