VIDEO: BuzzFeed’s Terry City Talks The Science Of Shareable Content

BY

“We all saw this shift coming, I don’t think anyone realized how fast this shift was going to come,” said BuzzFeed’s VP of west coast, Terry City, the first keynote at the 10th [a]list summit about mobile marketing on Dec. 3rd.

If you ask anyone to name some of the top publications they read on mobile, they will very likely name BuzzFeed if it isn’t the very first one they say. Even if City hadn’t seen the shift coming as fast as it is, BuzzFeed has certainly kept up with the shift in step. According to City, 60 percent of total time spent on mobile is social, and Buzzfeed matches that figure when it comes to their ownmobile traffic too. These are appealing figures to marketers in 2015.

How is this possible BuzzFeed’s hyper-focus on mobile is paying off as mobile is proving to be a screen that people spend a lot of time with (70 percent longer time on mobile pages than desktop) and share a lot more from (2.2 times higher share rates than desktop).

“Now we’re seeing social being the starting point,” said City, bringing up that the Internet funnel we had become acquainted with over the past years where users visit an portal like Yahoo or MSN, proceed to search for what they need and only then share on social. The mobile revolution has essentially turned that model upside down. “Seventy percent of our audience comes to BuzzFeed just to find something to share.”

“Seventy percent of our audience comes to BuzzFeed just to find something to share.”

The extent to which BuzzFeed focuses attention on mobile is notable. City says that BuzzFeed has a dedicated team which they refer to as the “Mobile Island” which is paid to think about mobile all day. Beyond that, BuzzFeed has a dedicated editorial team and one that creates content for brands.

This year, City says that BuzzFeed has seen a shift in the social network they are seeing the most traffic from. Interestingly, Pinterest has supplanted Twitter as the top traffic-driver for the site, which they have gone to lengths to improve the ease of sharing from by making it so readers could Pin a photo with just one click. This has driven traffic from Pinterest up even higher.

BuzzFeed’s philosophy and theory about their wildly popular content BuzzFeed sees their community as the Bored At Work Network, or the BWN. This is, according to City, “bigger than BBC, CNN or any other traditional network” and “a decentralized network that enables media to go social if ordinary people enjoy sharing it.”

“We have this theory that great content finds its audience,” said City. BuzzFeed certainly incorporates this mindset into their work with brands as well. City shares his concern that the shift in marketers’ digital budgets are behind the social shift. “There is definitely banner blindness out there.”

“We have this theory that great content finds its audience.”

“The funny thing is, people love brands […] they just don’t like to be advertised to,” City goes on to say. He shared a now-famous campaign that BuzzFeed collaborated on with Friskies, Dear Kitten, that City says basically broke the Internet.

BuzzFeed is seeing mobile video content increase in popularity by leaps. In just this past year, BuzzFeed’s video content has seen a jump in 140 million video views. This has spured the publication to create BuzzFeed Motion Pictures which City says “it will not be done in the traditional sense of Hollywood,” but focus on creating .gifs, 2 minute videos, and maybe some longer video in the future.

“Remember, if it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work,” said City in closing.

SuperData: Digital Games’s Holiday Photo-Finish Suggest Domination In 2015

BY

Interactive entertainment has reached a turning point. With games sales at retail in November down by 1 percent year-over-year according to NPD, the stage is set for digital games to claim the most important month of the year. Historically, December is the highest earning month for publishers in the United States, with over 40 percent of annual game software sales occurring during the last two months of the year. But while the numbers at retail disappoint, consumers are increasingly migrating toward digital distribution.

Shown: RETAIL, here defined as “total monthly software sales (PC + console) at retail,” according to NPD and DIGITAL, here defined as “combined total sales among digital game platforms (social, mobile, free-to-play MMO, subscription-based MMO, downloadable PC and digital console)” for the United States for the period January 2011 to November 2014. Digital sales based on transaction-level data collected by SuperData Research among 37 million paying online gamers. For more information on our methodology, please go here.

Photo Finish Suggests Digital Domination

Steadily averaging around a billion in monthly sales in the US, the digital games category is comprised of mobile, social, free-to-play, subscription, PC DLC and digital console sales. Retail sales, on the other hand, are highly seasonal and depend for a large part on the regular release of new hardware. But despite being in the early stage of a new console cycle, so far physical sales have been disappointing, reaching $1.071 billion in November due to a lack of new releases for the next console generation and the aggressive bundling at retail. As retailers tally the numbers for December, the financial industry has been releasing a salvo of early warnings, signaling the imminent release of disappointing figures.

Especially big blockbuster titles are increasingly purchased via digital download on consoles. Based on transaction data collected from over 37 million digital gamers, we were able to calculate that Take-Two Interactive’s hit title Grand Theft Auto V sold around 446,000 digital units in November, thereby exceeding analyst expectations. Since its September release, GTA V has sold around 2.7 million copies in total, or 7 percent of total unit sales, via download. By comparison Activision’s Destiny, which was released exactly a year later, sold 17 percent of total units via digital channels. Arguably the shooter game genre may appeal to an audience that is more likely to purchase via digital download, but it is difficult to dismiss the notion that the purchase preferences of console gamers are changing.

Suffering perhaps the most in this digital transition is specialty retailer GameStop, which will be reporting its 2014 holiday sales on January 13, but has announced it will not host a conference call. Despite unilaterally lowering the price of Activision’s most recent edition of its Call of Duty franchise to $39.99, it is unclear how effective this has been in offsetting the digital migration. More generally, the retailer has recently expanded its offering by acquiring several smaller tech and mobile retail stores to reduce its dependency on game sales.

Overall, games retailers have left the door open for digital distribution and are about to suffer the consequences. Basing our estimates on well over eight years of monthly sales at retail as provided by NPD, it appears that digital game sales are overtaking retail sales during the most important month of the year, during a critical time in the new console cycle. We’ll see what that means for the rest of the year, but digital is off to a strong start.

Go here to learn more about our research on the growing digital games market.

Marriott’s Content Studio Gets Right To Work On Its First Short Film

BY

The Marriott Content Studio is just getting started– it’s only been around for 3 months so far– but the studio has begun to create film now, too. Two Bellmen is the latest effort from the content studio and is a short film set at the JW Marriott LA LIVE hotel that is only just getting under production now, but will certainly dole out the thrills. The film is about an art heist at the hotel and features stunt doubles from Spider-Man and How I Met Your Mother.

Marriott’s creative division is led by David Beebe, VP of creative, who formerly worked at Disney-ABC.

“Our strategy on the highest level is built on the three Cs,” Beebe said to Digiday. “Creating content that entertains, informs and provides value to people, building a community with the people by doing content right over and over again, and eventually driving commerce from that community.”

Recently, Marriott had teamed with Oculus Rift to create a VR campaign that gave visitors an immersive travel experience extending the brand into interesting and exciting creative endeavors.

“For us, it’s all about relationships — we look at how we are changing people’s perceptions about our brand and building relationships. Really, here’s a brand that gets it, that realizes the way to build those relationships is to give content of value. A lot of brands talk about doing it, but it takes a lot of time and requires a shift in thinking.”

Newzoo/Overwolf December 2014 PC Game Rankings

BY

The 20 core PC Game Rankings remain stable at the Summit, with Riot’s League of Legends at Rank 1, followed by Wargaming’s World of Tanks and Mojang’s Minecraft at Rank 3. These three titles have remained Top 3 since we began recording the rankings in April 2014. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, Valve’s Counter Strike: Global Offensive and NCSoft’s Guild Wars 2 (Rank 4, 5 and 6 respectively) have stayed unchallenged since September 2014. This has given the PC Game Rankings a veneer of relative calm at the top over the past few months — a stability that is now under attack with the arrival of the New Year.

The Power of Smite

In November 2014 HiRez Studio’s Smite entered the Rankings at Number 18. We noted in our November 2014 report the company’s serious investment in the eSports arena, empowered by a substantial investment by Tencent and the crowd funding towards its World Championship prize pool. You can find out more about the eSports economy, audience & trends here.

It’s no surprise then to see Smite smash through the rankings, rising 11 places to take Rank 7, an almost unprecedented rise in the number of unique sessions in just a single month — dethroning DotA 2 as the runner-up MOBA to LoL in the process. HiRez Studios has not only seen their World Championship prize pool risen to become the third largest eSports prize pool in history ($2.5 Million) but registrations for their Xbox Open Beta have officially opened. This is obviously a serious challenge to the overall dominance of League of Legends and DotA 2 in the MOBA space as neither of these titles have (or are currently planning) a console version.

The Clash of Competitive Titles

The top 10 ranking is dominated by titles that are excelling on the competitive gaming front, with three MOBAs in the mix. In the next few weeks we can expect further competition and movement from the eSports titles as Blizzard’s contribution, Heroes of the Storm, will be entering closed beta on January 13. Having been in technical alpha for some time, pundits have seen the title as more casual friendly, with less emphasis on technical skill and complexity. With Blizzard’s powerful branding and strong core player following Heroes of the Storm has as much potential as Smite to upset the current domination of eSports by League of Legends and DotA 2

Blizzard isn’t just waging war on eSports. It’s casual-friendly card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has risen 2 places to Rank 8, riding the release success of its most recent expansion Goblins vs. Gnomes. It’s telling that Hearthstone has been not only the only card game title on the Top 20 Rankings, but now ranks in the Top 10.

It isn’t all good news for Blizzard as Diablo III fell another five places to Rank 19 as its player base continues to wait in vain for the long hyped expansion Ruins of Secheron.

Indie Wins, MMORPG Woes

Indie studio Freejam Games’s Robocraft has continued its ascension on the Rankings, rising five places to Rank 14. The title continues to accrue positive reviews on Steam, and recently won . . . Indie Game of the Year‘ on IndieDB.

December 2014 was on the whole a disappointment for MMORPG unique sessions. Despite Blizzard’s World of Warcraft holding steady at Rank 4 other titles did not fare so well, with Trion World’s ArcheAge falling five places to Rank 13. The title has been plagued with problems from the community with everything from its F2P model to its PVP game play. Despite a new expansion EA’s Star Wars: The Old Republic fell 1 place to Rank 11, with War Thunder declining to Rank 17. It’s telling that, possibly pushed by December Sales, Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim enters the Ranking at Rank 20 — with their MMO The Elder Scrolls Online nowhere to be seen.

Find more information on the eSports market and audience here.

About Overwolf

Overwolf is a customizable in-game overlay platform that has been installed in over 8 million PCs. This community of hardcore PC gamers are consistently making their own apps within the Overwolf platform and sharing them. Why Because it’s super simple and it enhances the gameplay experience of anyone’s favorite title in a personal way. From in-game chat systems to customized controls, streaming or video capture, Overwolf allows users to implement their own visions into these games and do so in a timely manner.

About Newzoo

Newzoo is the leading global market research firm focused purely on the games market. The company provides its clients with a mix of primary consumer research, transactional data and financial analysis across all continents, screens and business models. It is also known for actively sharing a variety of insights by means of free trend reports, infographics, blogposts and monthly rankings. Newzoo’s clients include Tencent, SEGA, Logitech, Wizards of the Coast, Nvidia, Microsoft, EA, Coca-Cola and Visa/PlaySpan.

China’s Console War May Have To Wait

BY

Don’t mark your calendars for the impending Chinese console wars just yet: Sony, scheduled to release their PlayStation 4 in Asia’s largest economy on January 11, has delayed its launch indefinitely due to “various factors”.

Reasons for the delay were unclear; though Sony’s Computer Entertainment division has declined to give a new release date nor specifics, a source in China pointed to difficult negotiations with local authorities as the culprit.

The PlayStation 4’s announced release was seen as a major milestone in China’s slowly opening gaming market, as the country had recently lifted a 14 year ban on foreign gaming consoles in time for Microsoft’s September launch of the Xbox One.

Even if Sony does manage to release the PlayStation 4 at a later date, they are expected to face an uphill battle against the country’s love of PC and mobile games. Over 527 million Chinese citizens own a smartphone; advertisers are flocking to handheld devices, following trends seen in the United States and elsewhere around the globe.

Though Sony says they are ready and willing to work with Chinese censors on releasing a region-appropriate product, they will still be faced with the task of bringing consoles to an entire generation largely unfamiliar with their existence, a task Microsoft is already trying their hardest to accomplish.

This Is The Formula for Mobile Game Success. Seriously.

BY

For those of you who attended our [a]list summit on mobile marketing last month, you had the opportunity to hear Andrew Stalbow, the co-founder and CEO of mobile game startup Seriously, speak about his belief in the huge potential for the mobile games space (second from the left in the picture above). In a blog post this morning, he gave an update which shows that his company’s first game, the puzzle adventure Best Fiends, is generating $50k per day just 10 weeks after launch, all without the backing of a traditional publisher. This comes from a startup with only 13 employees and an unknown IP and in a highly competitive app market. So how they do that There some strategic lessons in entrepreneurship and modern day marketing we can learn from highly successful mobile game startups

1. It’s all about the team.

While you might not have heard of mobile games startups like Seriously, Super Evil Megacorp, SGN and Next Games, they are all founded and run by gaming and social networking veterans, many with successful previous exits and experience from well-known companies such as EA, MySpace, Rovio and Supercell. In Seriously’s case, the first hires have backgrounds in top roles at Natural Motion, Rovio, Disney and Remedy. They have learned the biz on someone else’s dime and now bring that know-how to these startups where they also have the opportunity for a nice upside if the company and its games take off while keeping a fairly low overhead.

2. Come packing with a war chest of cash.

Most of these companies are well funded and they understand the importance of going big right out of the starting gate. They spend a lot of money on sophisticated user acquisition as well as smart marketing (using influencers and CE-partnerships, key art, trailers, music and graphics). For example, check out Seriously’s influencer campaign with the world’s biggest YouTuber PewDiePie or the behind-the-scenes video with Despicable Me music composer as he conducts as 68-piece live orchestra for the score to score their new game below.

 

3. Understand that dumb app downloads are worthless.

So the game has to be good, or in industry-speak, deliver user retention as well as monetization. While a “good game” is as much art and it is science, there are innovative ways of using marketing tactics that you can use to make the game more social. For example, for players of Best Fiends who log into Facebook, they enable people to see how they are faring against friends on a visually-appealing 3-D map, which has helped to push retention rates to 70 percent on day one and over 45 percent by day seven — high metrics by industry standards.

As mobile games revenues are expected to trump console game revenues this year, it will be an interesting space to watch as these fairly new companies are growing quickly and scooping up more and more talent hungry to innovate and win big.

 

It’s Apps—Not Brands—That Are Behind Mobile Advertising’s Surge

BY

—It’s safe to say that the consensus amongst most people today would be that everything is taking a turn towards mobile, which isn’t an unruly conception. It is 2015, after all. However, I’m sure you would be surprised to hear that mobile is, in fact, an untested channel for most Fortune 500 brands. eMarketer has projected that mobile advertising was set to hit $31.45 billion in 2014 and expected to grow by 34 percent this year.

However independent technology and market research company Forrester Research recently found that, contrary to popular belief, only five percent of brands’ total advertising budget is represented by mobile. This shows that the majority of these brands are not being exceedingly proactive on making significant increases in their mobile investment year-over-year.

If this is really the case, one wonders how the mobile advertising market is growing so quickly According to VentureBeat, the answer is that a majority of the mobile advertising market is comprised of, not brands, but app developers, rather.

Fueled by the massive success of multimillion-dollar brands such as Candy Crush or Kim Kardashian Hollywood, there is a rush amongst app developers to elicit downloads and cash in on the casual gaming market. These app-install ads consume almost every form of mobile advertising.

These ads have been the most prominent cause of mobile advertising growth over the past few years; however the mobile advertising marketplace could be set up for a rather rude awakening. Since a majority of mobile app developers are funded with venture capital, if the dynamics of the VC marketplace change, the amount of capital given to back the industry could contract dramatically.

Yes, the mobile advertising market seems to be on the up-and-up as of today, however these numbers could be artificially inflated. This being said, it could still represent an amazing opportunity for brands. According to VentureBeat, Flurry Analytics released a story revealing that consumers now spend more minutes staring at mobile screens than they do watching TV. I know what you’re thinking, hearing that statistic should cause almost all brands looking to capture consumer attention to join mobile as soon as possible — considering mobile screens are projected to become an essential part of the marketing mix. However, brand marketers must first overcome their apprehension with mobile.

According to Forrester’s research, 57 percent of brands say their primary business objective for mobile advertising is brand awareness, which could account for why marketers are only “somewhat confident” in their ability to measure the impact of mobile campaigns. However, mobile success is frequently measured by acquisition metrics like click-throughs and website hits.

In order to evaluate awareness, rather than judging mobile ads on performance measures, marketers and agencies must buy into the right metrics. Sure enough, it seems that this shift may have already begun. According to Jun Group research, the number of advertisers asking for brand studies has raised 69 percent over the past two years — however this is still only a quarter of national advertising campaigns.

In order for mobile to become a true alternative (or even a complement) to TV, VentureBeat suggests brands adopt the idea that the medium is a tool for brand awareness, rather than an acquisition or performance channel.

The app install era will come to an end eventually, but brands must always connect with their customers in efficient and quantifiable ways. The true growth in the mobile ad market will rest in the hands of agencies, tech providers, and publishers. If they are able to find a way to educate brands on the unique value of mobile advertising, then growth will come naturally.

Facebook Flexes Their Video Muscle

BY

Facebook, eager to sustain their position as the world’s biggest social network, released a post today designed to remind consumers and brands of their video prowess.

The post, released on the network’s Facebook Media blog, is long on both information and pure statistics. Noting that they are “increasingly seeing a shift towards visual content on Facebook,” Facebook drops their first takeaway by revealing that the number of on-site video posts per person has increased 75 percent worldwide and 94 percent in the United States in just the past year.

This shift towards video, of course, carries natural consequences for the composition of the News Feed. Facebook acknowledges this fact, stating that the number of clips “from people and brands” in the News Feed is up 3.6x over the past year.

Facebook now averages over a billion video views a day; 50 percent of American Facebookers watch at least one video every day, while 76 percent claim they “tend to discover the videos they watch on Facebook.”

All these statistics are well and good and make Facebook’s place as a viable competitor to YouTube quite clear, but what does it all mean for content creators and marketers

Facebook has that angle covered in their post, too, offering advice for creators and brands alike by suggesting they take advantage of video’s meteoric rise and their autoplay feature to post timely, succinct clips capable of capturing someone’s attention from the start.

Indeed, creators and brands alike should take heed as the ever-increasing importance of mobile places a greater emphasis on to-the-point, shareable content.

Medium — Yes, Medium — Is Also Doing Original Video

BY

By: Sahil Patel

Medium, the digital publishing platform founded by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has launched its first original series.

Dubbed “Foreword,” the weekly series will feature interviews with well-known authors and writers including screen talent like Jason Segel and John Cleese, as well as novelists like Margaret Atwood and Anne Lamott. Spanning 12 episodes, the series is hosted by New York Times bestselling author Kelly Corrigan, who describes the series as  “akin to a late-night graduate school conversation with some of the most interesting and thoughtful people on the planet.”

Read more…

This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.

Rumble Entertainment Aims for Engagement

BY

There have been a large number of game startups in the past five years, most of them focusing on mobile games. One company that’s taken a somewhat different road is Rumble Entertainment, headed by EA veteran Greg Richardson. The company has found success in building a cross-platform action RPG, KingsRoad, that’s been keeping players engaged in the browser, on Facebook and now on mobile platforms.

The [a]listdaily sat down for a long conversation with Richardson about Rumble Entertainment’s evolution and where then entire game industry is headed. Richardson’s perspective as a veteran of console, social, and now mobile games gives him a wide view of where the industry has been and where it might be headed.

Greg Richardson

How have things been changing for Rumble Entertainment this last year?

2014 has really been about getting to mobile for us. The second piece of news is learning what it takes to build games that are going to last for years and years. KingsRoad we launched into beta in 2013, and we lifted the beta moniker at the very beginning of this year and went into live ops and creating a very high cadence of new content and running events. We’ve really been able to build a nice business there, and we’re really proud of the long-term veteran engagement. We get the vast majority of our engaged veterans playing month after month. That’s really exciting for us because that’s what we set out to do.

What do you see as the most important trends in mobile gaming for 2015?

One of the things that was implied in what you were saying is that the world is quickly moving toward people designing and investing in games that they believe players can play in for four or five years, as opposed to four or five months which I believe characterized the majority of the intention of free-to-play mobile games over the last four or five years.

If you can come up with a game that engages people for a long time, that’s both more profitable and much more satisfying to players.

That last point’s really important. Think about it from the player’s perspective. If they’re constantly getting their interest piqued to play a game that looks really exciting and that they enjoy for a week or two and then leave behind, not only does it mute their desire to try anything new going forward but they just generally get a fatigue. It’s like trying out a bunch of new restaurants, going once or twice and never going back again, it becomes a frustrating exercise. Whereas if you find something you love, it can become part of your life. It becomes a hobby, a passion, a sport, a group, a club you join. That’s really where you’re enriching people. That’s really where the opportunity of games as a service and free-to-play can evolve from the limited experiences we were creating on consoles and PC packaged goods games.

That’s a good way to look at it. You want to create something that becomes part of someone’s life, and it has to be worthy of that. It’s not just a throwaway piece of entertainment.

That’s true. What really separates the game experiences that are capable of becoming part of someone’s life is connecting them with other people that they really enjoy playing with, seeing and interacting with. So the social aspect is absolutely essential. We’re really excited because KingsRoad, after a long labor of getting the game to be a great ground-up mobile experience, it’s finally going to launch on tablets. One of the things that we’re excited about, you kind of hinted at but really didn’t call it out in your article, is that not only is it going to be the first full-blown action roleplaying game to hit mobile devices.

That’s in line with your notion that console and PC games are coming to mobile. But it’s also synchronous multiplayer, and it’s a full world with lots of other players, and you can play in real time with other players. That’s the next dimension that people haven’t broken into with mobile here in the West, which I think is really exciting. You saw Vainglory do that, and look at the number of users they’ve got on a daily basis. It’s something we’ve done to build long-term social glue for the players on Facebook, which is to bring synchronous multiplayer to that system, and now we’re doing it on mobile. I think it’s a real catalyst for this kind of three-to-four-year plus game cycle.

To me, as you have a broader audience available to you, they’re not focused on the platform the way a hardcore console gamer is. The general audience just wants to play the game where they are with what they have, and they don’t really care what brand of tablet, computer, or console it is. They just want to play it wherever they are, and get the experience.

That’s exactly right. You’ve hit on something that I think very few writers and reporters ever note, because you get so caught up into the inside baseball of the industry you can lose sight of the player’s perspective. Somehow I think the game industry believes it’s not held by the same rules that those individuals take to consume movies, music, or books. It’s exactly as you described. I want it to be with me wherever I am, I want it to work correctly, and I want it to be incredibly engaging and fun.

We’re one of the few people that still believe you want to deliver games cross-platform. You’ve seen companies release games on Facebook and then come back and release the game on mobile, but they’re not the same game and it’s not a shared experience. You’ve heard a lot of other people running away from the PC, but the truth is there’s still billions of people using PCs every day, and there’s still billions of people using televisions every day. Now we’ve added mobile devices, but it hasn’t meant that people aren’t watching TV any more or they’re not working on their PCs.

When KingsRoad launches on mobile, it’s fully synchronized and playable across PC and mobile devices. So you can be on your phone — we haven’t launched it yet, but it’s coming in early 2015 — and Evan can be on his tablet, and I can be on a PC, and the three of us can be running on a map together.

See the rest of this interview with Greg Richardson tomorrow on [a]listdaily.