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Affiliate marketing offers several options on how to make money online. Whether it’s email marketing, sponsorship, social media, web banners or creating content, there are many ways. The most important thing is to understand the niche market you want to target and get to know the audience and your competitors. In order to reach all major markets, affiliate marketing is now looking into online gaming, a fast-growing market.
The gaming industry is growing fast and it is booming worldwide. A 10.7% increase over the previous year makes all experts have an optimistic outlook enough to that the industry could generate more than $143 billion by the year 2020. Traditionally, online gaming accounts for a large part of this income and generates billions of dollars per year. By design, this is an area that fosters interaction and engagement and offers advertisers lucrative discovery opportunities.
Let’s did into some of the ways in which the gaming industry offers advertisers the opportunity to take advantage of affiliate marketing.
The importance of the audience
The use of affiliate marketing in the gaming industry does not work in the same as in other platforms. Although it is a different type of business, it can offer partners great opportunities to leverage their traffic or their projects. It’s easy to understand why the most enthusiastic players dream of making money with what they do. Whether it’s streaming, blogging or revenue, affiliate programs can lead them to a solid and passive income and help them realize their dreams.
Affiliates can use online games to offer easy commission forms, especially if they reach the right audience. After all, it’s not necessarily about understanding everything, it’s about involving the right people. This can be accomplished by including affiliate links in descriptions and videos, or showing unique affiliate promotion codes in feeds. For example, a player can make money by advertising another game by encouraging its recipients to perform simple tasks: sign up for the game, play it several times, or complete a number of tasks.
The Swedish gamer PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, is a good example of a successful video gamer on YouTube. He stood out on the top of money makers on YouTube where he generated $12 million in advertising revenue, affiliate links and endorsements. For instance he can make money by publishing a video on YouTube wearing a headset and providing a direct link to the same headset through the seller’s website. Affiliates such as PewDiePie make money by getting a commission for purchases and clicks made through personalized links.
For instance Twitch a popular streaming platform for players who have their own affiliate program. With Twitch, affiliates can make money by selling in-game items and subscriptions from viewers. As the program grows, it is planned that they introduce additional monetization tools for affiliates.
The gaming industry offers a variety of ways to reach a very specific audience. Therefore, it is not surprising that advertisers want to take advantage of these opportunities. In particular, affiliate marketing allows them to reach niche consumer segments, especially when they want to promote gaming services and products. The audience for video games is in no way homogeneous, so access to converting traffic is invaluable.
If advertisers know who they want to target, depending on channels and content, affiliate marketing can help them engage reliably and relatively cheaply. This gives them constant access to statistics, protection against fraud and the ability to test and switch between different sources and traffic segments.
Everyone wins
But why affiliate marketing and online gaming work so well together? Well, that’s easy. In the world of gaming, whether you play or view content, end users switch to interactive mode by clicking, participating and chatting. This environment is fertile ground for engagement, especially in terms of relevant content. Whether they play their favorite game or watching, users are part of the trusted media, making them more likely to accept their recommendations. Imagine seeing a broadcast device with a new ergonomic mouse. After watching it used for hours, you can see for yourself how well it works. And all a gamer has to do to buy it is just click on the link bellow.
Affiliates also benefit from it. Thanks to the large number of affiliate programs, you no longer have to rely on just one partner. When you join the content network, you don’t even have to sign a new contract with every game publisher. The network facilitates the management of communication with advertisers and legal issues. In addition, not only do they have access to a stable income, but they can also negotiate more favorable terms for themselves. By demonstrating their results, they can reduce waiting times while advertisers evaluate traffic quality to enable fully scalable collaboration.
Affiliate marketing is able to introduce data in such a powerful environment. This is especially important for game developers and other publishers who carefully attract users and carefully analyze fresh traffic sources. Advertisers can easily optimize their campaigns and receive constant information from traffic providers to understand what works and what doesn’t work in real time. In addition, advertisers don’t pay for clicks or views, but for the concrete actions of real users, which give them tangible results and an easier way to achieve ROI goals across the content network.
With this increased flexibility, advertisers can create their own sponsorship programs to reward content creators and partners, generate new traffic on specific demographics, select exact types of traffic, geography, and payments, and determine the pulse of their marketing activities.
What does the future hold?
Every new industry has a learning curve and the introduction of marketing partnerships for online games is no exception. Some companies have learned a difficult lesson from this situation after receiving numerous comments from the press, viewers and especially from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Entertainment giant Warner Brothers has been criticized for promoting one of its games by working with other players who have not been properly disclosed. Top-notch sites received millions of page views and visitors did not know that those who influenced their sales were being paid. This has led the FTC to develop guidelines to address the issue of transparency, which is important to the industry.
The FTC has been targeting the industry for few years already. For example, in September 2016, the FTC penalized Machinima’s YouTube gaming network for paying 2 personalities to create videos on YouTube without revealing the details or the promotional nature of the content. Even with these efforts, the FTC guidelines have generally been ignored due to scarce resources. Whether editors deliberately ignore or ignore the consequences, the unfortunate truth is that in the field of gaming less than 13% of affiliates made all the legal disclosures.
There is no doubt that much remains to be done to meet certain ethical standards. Since companies and platforms often exclude people who have a bad reputation as influential buyers, the same standard should be used for information disclosure. But perhaps the most important step is the development of manual and automatic monitoring mechanisms to verify hashtags, content, codes and mentions, and to identify possible irregularities.
In addition to greater control, the power of viewers and partners is expected to shape the industry by controlling the decisions of large corporations. For example, when Nintendo first introduced its Creators profit-sharing program, it introduced extremely harsh conditions that forced YouTubers to become compliant if they wanted to show Nintendo in their films. After three difficult years of criticism from YouTubers, Nintendo closed its Creator program and introduced a more powerful version that shares a significant part of the revenue.
The final Gist
Finally, with the development of the video game industry, many traffic sources and partners offer more and more opportunities. More importantly, the number of high-quality traffic sources will also increase as new players enter the industry, especially those familiar with the gaming world. These key players will have a better idea of which target group and how they can attract their attention, offering an open opportunity to offer their products or turn them into new players.
