Influencer marketing: Meet the real data

[Music] [Music] okay so yeah hey I'm your CEO CEO and founder of match-made if you don't know what much mate is then much mate is an intelligent data-driven influencer marketing platform I used to live in California and I used to make these presentations that were very like inspirational you know like very low on content but trying to be funny and trying to give a lot of like good sound bites but now I now I live in Germany and there's no no fun allowed everything is everything is factual data-driven serious so this presentation is only gonna be numbers and graphs so the kind of function of this presentation is that whenever I show a new slide you take a

photo and then you look at it when you get home all right my background is not in marketing my background is not in data but I've been in this industry for quite a while so this is now year 16 for me my background is in engineering so I've worked in on mobile games like the very earliest kind of third-party games where you would have like there's like 80 80 by 60 pixel screens black and white you know Java games for Nokia phones I worked in games media was the CTO of a Finnish games media company I'd been a producer for console games producer for PC games I founded companies I've sold companies the previous one was acquired by Walt Disney Interactive so I was the youngest Disney vice president for a couple of years and now for the last several years I've been running a company called short punch and short punch initially started as an indie game studio we made a game called the master plan which is this kind of bank-robbery simulator and when we were doing the master plan we started talking

to a lot of indie gaming studios and we started talking about game discovery and how do we how do we find the right audience for a specific game so we first started kind of like attacking that problem with a thing called play field which was consumer facing kind of content curation platform so what we did we did with play field is that we would analyze a lot of gaming content and we would try to figure out which content is interesting to a specific person that didn't work there was a disaster we spent a lot of money in the show for it but when we were doing that we started working with influencers and we realized that we had something pretty unique so we have built the system that allows us to go through every single YouTube gaming video and we can identify for each video like what is the video about which game is the video about what's the what's the audience engagement and based on this data we can do a lot of pretty interesting things and this presentation is basically gonna be me sharing some of that data with you so as I said we index every single YouTube gaming video but we

only look at the ones that have over 5,000 views for this presentation to keep things a little bit cleaner and we also run YouTube in version marketing campaigns so we have a lot of data on performance of actual campaigns so I will take some of this data and share it with you why this matters well this is something that was kind of already touched upon but I mean obviously influencer marketing can give you great results so you can this is just example numbers for some of the campaigns we've done your mileage may vary but I mean in general we see that with influencer marketing campaigns if you do it right you can attract super high quality users so really great conversions really great monetization really great retention so I think it's a channel that everybody should be looking at there's also some other benefits so there's the whole organic lift that was was touched upon in the previous one so for a clear some examples from some of our campaigns so the first one is comparing the kind of number of organic installs that we would see on top of the attribute Edina sauce that we could actually track reliably

and as you can see for example for what the hen we have a Philip the CEO of the company here in the audience we've seen a pretty nice boost in the number of organically installs for for that game another interesting thing is that YouTube in photo campaigns can really drive a lot of reviews a lot of engagement in the App Store so the bottom a graph is from one of our customers as well and you can see in the beginning here you can see that when they launch their game they got global launched featuring from Apple which gave them you know quite a lot of reviews decent reviews like the green one star five stars four stars but interesting thing is that then like weh-weh later we we run a campaign with them and you can see that actually the number of reviews they got when the first videos went live is actually higher than the number of reviews they got when when they got global featuring from Apple and the other thing is that the reviews are really great I mean like they you get amazing five-star reviews and this is something that's like it's kind of hard to quantify kind of hard to

predict but it's like when you're considering your like different marketing channels then I doubt that traditional performance-based ads would drive these kinds of reviews that you can get from working with influencers anyway so now the data the data YouTube gaming is pretty large first of all so there's this soon soon gonna be about 1.4 million active YouTube gaming channels and as you can see it's not slowing down so we're already like you know there's there's 50% more at this point than there were in the last year so this is still like accelerating actually YouTube gaming is not you know like not about to like you know become like a stable thing it's still growing extremely fast and that's not gonna change and what I think is amazing is that most of these channels are actually actively doing actively creating content so our definition is that if if a channel has posted new content in the last degree 90 days then we considered them active and you can see that over 80% of the channels are still actively posting stuff and what I think is amazing is

that when we look at the average lifetime of a channel that is no longer posting content the average one would still keep posting stuff for three years before they stopped so I think it's really like when you work with influencers like you should assume that most of them are in it for the long term for for the long run which means that you should also be kind of trying to establish like really like long lasting relationships because they will keep at it and maybe they will grow and maybe you will grow with them obviously most of these channels are tiny so if we look at the look at this the majority of the channels have between 10 to 100 subscribers and you know let you know let's be honest like if a channel with 10 subscribers makes a video about your game that will probably not change anything at all but then when we when we look at the kind of the actual aggregate number of views that you can get across all these different size groups you can see that the majority of views on YouTube videos is for channels that are somewhere between 100k and and ten million subscribers which admittedly is

fairly broad but I think what this graph kind of illustrates that you get the most bang for your buck you really want to be looking at this kind of like hundred K to 1 million or 1 million plus range and probably just ignore everybody else and you can see that the really big guys the 10 million plus some channels like they're actually like compared to all the other channels that they're not driving that money that many views which means they're not driving that many installs either of course if your situation is that you just want to get one video that you can take to your boss and impress them then of course that's that's the moment where you just you find the biggest possible YouTube or you can work with you give them a lot of money and then you pray that they don't dress up as Hitler or whatever they might you know decide to do that day not not referring to PewDiePie obviously but I mean the reality is and I think this is something that many other speakers will also say that the reality is that if you work with the guys who have over 10 million subscribers then you're not the one who's driving that relationship

like you don't know what the hell's gonna come out of it but probably you're not gonna get the kind of results that you are paying for so it's usually not worth it all right so then we look at the kind of the types of people you can reach well first of all like obviously many many many of the youtubers are us-based or they claim they are us-based the reality is that this is not the actual case I mean like there's kind of a trend that many many youtubers from smaller countries will say that they are American because they think that helps them reach an American audience maybe that's true maybe it's not but you can still kind of get like the overall shape so you can see that you know yes the u.s. is huge Brazil is huge Britain is big you know Spain Russia blah blah blah blah blah but you can also see that for example you have a Japan and Korea which are supposedly not that big on YouTube you can see that they're actually driving quite a lot of views especially when you compare the filter ratio of views to subscribers you can see that

actually in Japan and Korea you can get a lot of eyeballs for for your videos so if those are markets that work for you for your game then I think it really makes sense to really try to work with Infosys there it's gonna be hard but it might be worth it now the thing and this was also mentioned in the previous previous presentation the thing is that if you just talk with a youtuber and you ask them like hey where's your audience from and they say oh yeah you know American that might be the case so this is these are screenshots from match-made these are influencers we actually work with and you can see the one on the left so that's an American youtuber and you can see most of their audience is from the United States you know followed by UK Canada Australia other english-speaking countries and this is probably your expectation when you approach at your us-based influencer that this is the people you're gonna reach similarly then the second one is Russian youtuber who can they reach well they can reach Russian people Ukrainians Kazakhstan these people whatever like as you would expect third one Spanish guy you can

reach Spain Mexico Argentina etc this is like this all makes sense this all what you would expect but then the person on the right also us-based influencer same as the first one but suddenly now 15% of their audience is from the US second biggest group is Russia followed by Poland followed by Germany and this you know if you just if you would just ask these influences like hey who's your audience they would both say like oh yeah Americans absolutely not true so I think when you work with influencers it's super super important to always work with actual data like don't don't be happy with whatever they tell you because it might be in their interests to have you believe that you know you are reaching Americans when in reality you're reaching a lot of Russians and that might have a pretty big impact on your return on investment there's just some interesting data on differences by country so yes I mean I'm not gonna get like super deep into this but you can see that um obviously there are some

countries where you know PC is not really a thing at all you can see that in India handheld consoles are not a thing at all you can see of course that Mobile is huge in the countries you would expect it to be huge and blah blah blah but I'm not gonna get into this just take your photo come ask me about it later that that's gonna be more useful for all of us take the photo when we look at the kind of like the profile of the audience the demographics it's kind of what you would expect right so you know you with YouTube you can reach male Millennials that that that's that obviously they're still like you know almost one-third are women and I think one interesting pattern that we've seen is that for every every single channel that we've looked at that has more than 50% women subscribers they have a female host or a female co-host like no no no exceptions so basically if you if you have a game that really appeals to the female audience then I think it makes complete sense to work

mostly with with female influences as well I think got the H on the H side I'm already too old for YouTube I guess many of us actually are but I mean the reality is that you know YouTube is for young people and that's not gonna change so I mean I don't know if anybody has a game that really monetize as well with people 45 Plus do you know so yeah anyway um then on some trends YouTube gaming is minecraft there's nothing else you could you could remove every single other game from YouTube gaming and you would still be looking at you know on like 70,000 channels so this is kind of ridiculous like Minecraft is what is it now eight years old and it's bigger than anything else on YouTube by a fairly large margin obviously followed by the usual suspects you know you of course GTA 5 is there and thank God clash for y'all thank our supercell is

there but I guess this is kind of like what what you would expect right if we look at mobile minecraft is still there but not the biggest anymore so now we have now we have two minecraft that are both both in the graph we have story mode and we have Minecraft Pocket Edition as in mobile gaming in general supercell is very dominant but I don't I don't have the graph for for this but I think there's there's an interesting opportunity for developers right now where we can see that both clash for y'all and clash of clans are starting to peak on YouTube they're not growing they might even be diminishing which means that there's there's a billion channels but not really theirs but I don't know there's tens of thousands of channels that only only play clash Royale or Clash of Kings the clash of clans and those many of those channels are seeing their numbers decline and they're actively looking for something new to play so I think if you happen to have a game that really appeals to people who

play clash Royale then now might be the time to really like just go all-in invest heavily in the influence of marketing because you might say some pretty good results what else consoles are bigger than you would expect but this is actually based on the fact that our analysis looks at whether a specific game is available on on on a platform so console games are a lot bigger than then you would expect and and console games are not very actively marketed on YouTube so I think that's another opportunity like if you have a game that's available on console you should probably look into spending money with influencers the bad thing of course is that it's kind of hard to track what the results are but the audience is definitely there people don't like mobile gaming videos which is unfortunate but obviously like this is kind of a symptom of many mobile games just not being designed for YouTube so because the videos are gonna be shorter they're not often visually as impressive

as that's you know a console game or a triple-a PC game might be but I think we're now seeing that a lot of developers are taking YouTube and streamers and in functions into account when they build the game and we were saying this with some of the companies we work with like if you have you know like exciting engaging gameplay if you have multiplayer if you have exciting visuals then you will do a lot better with influencers so I think this this graph is slowly changing like mobile mobile gameplay videos are definitely growing on YouTube and growing very fast yeah what's happening right now so this is this is comparing the number of channels that cover the specific game in the last two months and contrasting that with the previous two month period and obviously I mean everybody knows that pop G is this year's phenomena in gaming like fastest growing thing ever right and that's reflected in any YouTube but what I think is really goddamn scary is that the third one is minecraft I mean so minecraft added almost as many

channels like this here asked it the fastest-growing game ever and this is a game that's been on YouTube forever this is a game that's by void marching the biggest game on YouTube at all and it's still growing like crazy another interesting thing is that you can see that for example bunch of a bunch of the new Nintendo games they got they got heavy featuring a lot of visibility on YouTube when they when they were launched and then they just disappeared and yeah take a photo ask me about it later and then finally we're trying to try to predict what's what's next again pop G is off the charts I like and like if I showed you the fool like not cropped graph you wouldn't even see the other lines like pop G is just huge but there's some interesting ones I mean for example like you can see the crash bandicoot really took off fortnight really really took off and you can see that there's a couple of sports games that are like slowly slowly grinding up

and then of course like the kind of interesting stuff is on the right because here you can see a couple of games that have just recently started on that upward curve and it'll be interesting to see where these games are half a year from now or a year from now and yeah maybe if you're working on a game if you're planning to release something pretty soon then I would pay attention to what kind of games have that effect that actually that have that kind of like exponential growth and see if you have something similar and if you do then I would look into working with influencers that is all thank you we have time yeah I change the microphone and then nothing happens there you you have some times for some questions anyone there's a over there in the corner do covered

I will have to promote my stuff right now because yes if you work with us then yes it's verified you will say the actual audience numbers so I mean basically if you work directly with the influencers they will often refuse to give you any kind of like actual data or they will give you screenshots that you can't verify we don't work with influencers unless they give us direct access to their YouTube analytics so we know for every single person we work with we know exactly who the audience is and how the audience has been changing but I mean I think with direct deals it's always there's always gonna be a heavy kind of element of trust and you can't really do much about that just try to find people you actually trust and work with them [Music]

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