Today, gaming is seeing an active development boost on YouTube. If comparing to 2013, the following category has increased by 40 times in terms of viewership. At the same time, the number of YouTube bloggers and the content, which is potentially suitable for massive advertising campaigns, is currently seeing a rapid growth, which is an indicator for the expanding new sphere. This is used by many companies, offering their products.

Unlike, for instance, such categories as music or automobile with the most content (80-90%) created by 10 top-bloggers, the gaming sphere enjoys far better variety of authors, who produce various videos. The top-10 gaming bloggers are only responsible for 38% of the whole content. This trend shows that viewers of the gaming content like different genres, which means, that there’re great opportunities for advertisers, since there’re more bloggers with targeted audience, not only top super popular stars.

Blogger is not just a person, who films entertaining or useful videos. Blogger is an influencer, who is a mental leader for his subscribers. Those gamers, who watch corresponding videos, trust bloggers, when making purchases (24% of the respondents), instead of cyber-sportsmen (16%), sportsmen (12%), musicians (12%) or actors (12%).

The loyalty and trust to bloggers reflects in their customs: the majority of viewers aged 18-24 and half of the audience aged 25-34 watch gaming videos on their favorite channels and try not to miss out the latest releases and even review the older posts. Many users, irrespective of their age, are ready to support their favorite bloggers (56-57%) and even follow the link they advise (45-47%). All this evidence show that bloggers have very strong connection to their targeted audience. Therefore, advertisers can easily maintain trust-based relations with the loyal audience of the author through communicating with him and integrating advertising campaigns to their content.

What is the basis of any bloggers work? That’s right, it’s creativity.

Gaming bloggers are the new type of superstars. Each of them has its own genre, theme and audience, which they value most of all. “Viewers above all” – this is the main strategy of most bloggers like LeTSPLaySHiK, for example. He gives players an opportunity to choose, how will the story of his “Minecraft school” go further, by simply putting a like under the video. Many other bloggers, like EeOneGuy – the most popular and rapidly developing gaming blogger with almost 12 billion subscribers, – publish not only themed videos, but lifestyle-content as well.

The most successful and interesting YouTube projects by bloggers and brands occur, when both author’s and audience’s interests coincide with the brand positioning. So, the right strategy for advertisers would be deciding on the targeted audience and then appoint some popular blogger their ambassador.

It’s very important for video bloggers to stay creative, when representing branded products. Advertising implemented in their content is a great opportunity for authors to bring their super ideas to life and create quality videos, which their audience will definitely love. According to Ivanguy, advertisers need to give more trust to bloggers, since they know the right approach to the targeted audience and can make perfect presentation of the brand and their ideas. Ivanguy also says, that it doesn’t actually matter, what product you’re going to advertise: you can invent a mind-blowing idea and blend it in with your content – this works for any product.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, the popularity of the gaming content is one of the most vivid trends of the digital era and advertisers should seriously consider it. Gaming content – is one of the most popular and big YouTube categories. Despite common misconception about the structure of the gaming audience, the viewers of the following contents are most sound adults of different interests. When making purchases, these people tend to listen to the opinions of bloggers, rather than other celebrities’.

Popular bloggers of the gaming category often choose quite diverse approaches, when deciding on the theme and format of their content, but all these approaches work equally well, when it comes to attracting and retaining viewers. Video bloggers have introduced an absolutely different meaning to their communication with viewers by maintaining a trust-based dialogue and always giving credits to viewers’ feedback.

Such approach is very helpful when it comes to understanding viewers’ interests and finding the right touch. Many of today’s advertisers are ready to apply this knowledge to their relationship with brands in order to translate a particular message or advertisement to their potential clients in the right and creative way. Working closely with the gaming viewers can help advertisers to attract millions of loyal customers, providing that they find a proper way to embrace and attract this audience.