Table of contents
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- Dwarf Fortress: What Happens When It Becomes A Game? The Zach and Tarn Adams Interviews
- Zach Adams: The way that we marketed the game is that we created a website that had a forum that we'd answer questions on that where people could talk about our games and other games, and that forum became really popular. And it's because of that that we were successful. That forum is really hard to maintain; every day we have to make sure that it's not being run over by trolls or devolving into meaningless arguments. We have to make sure that people are engaged because not only marketing wise this is the reason we're successful because of the forum but also because of the people that help this. There's people that donated their time and helped us rewrite Dwarf Fortress to work on Linux for example or Apple. Without them it wouldn't have happened. So it's like having that forum is the reason we made it.
- Tarn Adams: The way we operated on this kind of contribution based model that wasn't based on sales the forum was sort of you know many times more important than it would be to other people as a form of community building. People that do retail like sales on say steam or something don't necessarily need to have a community at all you can you mean if you if you have a hit it's going to be a hit whether or not you have a community and you'll basically be running from your community in in certain cases right after that you don't want to deal with certain things whereas for us you know cultivating a community over the 17 years is the only reason we're still here–like, the only reason we're still here–and for people that are setting up say a patreon or that are planning to finance their game in some other more amorphous way the people that you're going to be getting money from are the people that are gonna be playing your game and the people that stick around will continue to give you money and it's worth it having a relationship with them and it's led to all kinds of cool things having community these the the fact that we took contributions at all came six years after having a forum and it was from the forum that that idea we didn't have that idea it was an idea that came from the forum.
Advertising
- Tools
- Articles
Product Hunt
2017.04.26 - Hack-PR.com - How We Hacked Reddit to Generate 5 Million Media Impressions in 3 days
- HN discussion
- Summary:
After a quick brainstorm, I set my sights on Reddit. I follow various threads on Reddit on a daily basis and understand the power it has to make something go viral. I just didn’t know how to do it. I knew that if I could get one of my links to the top of Reddit Politics, I would have a pretty good chance of making the idea spread, so I set that as my goal: Get to the top of Reddit Politics within 24 hours.
What I did next was simple and cheap. From my own personal reddit account (Probably should have used a fake account or someone else’s), I posted a link to our Washington Times story on Reddit Politics. Then I went to Fiverr.com and bought every UpVote package that was offered. Total cost: $35. Two hours later I came back to check the results. We were number one with over 500 comments already.
We had media lists built of every journalist and writer in politics and began blasting them with “anonymous” tips from fake email addresses. [Examples: 1) Subject: 'Have You Seen This?'; Body: 'Just saw this at the top of Reddit....thought you might find it interesting.....<br>link'; 2) Subject: 'Is this law for real?'; Body: same as in (1).]We sent these types of emails out to over 20,000 media contacts from 6 different email accounts.
The media requests began to pour in like we’ve never seen before. We had so many requests coming in it was challenging to respond to them all. That is a great, great problem to have.
Vice, Al Jazeera , US News , even Anonymous wrote about the idea, and every time we got a new media hit, we followed the same process on Reddit. Post the link to various Reddit threads and then go on Fiverr and buy UpVotes to make sure we got to the top. In just the first few days, we had over 50 media outlets covering our story.
As the idea continued to spread like wildfire, our website began to crash. In 3 days alone, we had received over 2 million hits to the website, but most importantly, we had had over 4,000 volunteers sign up.
To keep our momentum going, we sent out this urgent request to those volunteers, pleading for their support to spread our idea. We turned our 4,000 supporters into a media pitching machine.
[He shows an image of a fairly standard email urging people to 1. contact journalists that cover politics, 2. tell the journalists that they support this cause, and 3. giving them three recent articles to choose from as a reference to link to.]Another wave of media requests came in from this push and we just kept up with the same process: Post on Reddit, buy UpVotes, repeat.
In less than a few days we had generated over 5,000,000 media impressions and received over 6 million website hits. Total cost? $255 from Fiverr.com.
Tinder
- Create a fake profile and include a reference to your product in the profile.
- David did this for Bernie Sanders
- Scale API seemed to do this for their product (I can't remember seeing any other woman reference a tech product in her profile).
YouTube
Services
Advice
- How much do YouTubers make from sponsorships / referrals?
- Audible
- It seems that the "Audible sponsorship" is actually just a referral program, where YouTubers get $15 for every trial membership. The actual Audible membership costs $15/month after the first 30 day trial period, so that seems to be how they've determined what the bonus should be.
- Audible Creator Program
- Articles
- 2016.02.25 - NYT - Getting YouTube Stars to Sell Your Product
- It basically just describes how FameBit allows smaller brands and smaller YouTubers to connect. It's a marketplace like Upwork.
- FameBit takes a 10 percent fee from both sides of the transaction.
- Most brands on FameBit pay influencers $500 to $2,000 to feature a product or service. More than 23,000 influencers — largely video creators — use the platform now, Ms. Kozera said, as do more than 3,500 brands, from smaller start-ups like Dollar Shave Club to much bigger names like Adidas and L’Oreal.
- 2016.02.25 - NYT - Getting YouTube Stars to Sell Your Product
- Audible
- How much are YouTubers making?
- Quora - Do famous/successful YouTubers really make millions of dollars each year and even per month?
- 2018.05.10 - Jörg Sprave, Owner at The Slingshot Channel:
- A YouTube video will get you between 40 cents and maybe 2 dollars per 1000 views [from AdSense], on average, depending on the category your videos belong to.
- My videos are in the “science and tech” category, so for me 40 cents per 1000 views is more realistic. That was enough to get me an average of about 6k per month, from adsense.
- Due to their nature (muscle operated weapons and contraptions) I am much affected by the adpocalypse, means, my videos are filtered out by YouTube’s bot system that favors fully monetized videos in Search and Recommended.
- My google income is down to under 1 k per month now, and I have almost 2 million subscribers.
- YouTube now wants to push the Hollywood celebrities as those seem more safe for their advertisers.
- 2018.05.10 - Jörg Sprave, Owner at The Slingshot Channel:
- Quora - Do famous/successful YouTubers really make millions of dollars each year and even per month?
This company helps you connect with YouTube influencers / bloggers / Instagrammers / etc.
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Billboards
2004.01.21 - Talk at Stanford Technology Ventures Program
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMater ... l?mid=1021
Speaker(s): Max Levchin , Peter Thiel
advertising (billboards) wasn't cost effective b/c it had started to cost $100,000 for 1 month and each sign was only seen for 6-10 seconds
Don't use noreply@yourdomain.com on emails
http://customer.io/blog/dont-use-noreply-on-emails.html
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