Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

“If we can take advantage and build scale and build importance in that algorithm, then we might be at a competitive advantage when they do turn on monetization,” said David Spiegel, CRO of Betches Media.

When the YouTube Shorts revenue-sharing program launches, YouTube will share 45% of its Shorts ad revenue with eligible creators and publishers, which is less than the 55% of ad revenue that YoTube shares for traditional, long-form videos. That revenue will be allocated on a monthly basis, and the amount of money that individual creators and publishers receive will be in proportion to their videos’ share of total Shorts views, according to YouTube’s blog post announcing the revenue-sharing program.

Experimentation time

Creators across YouTube are experimenting more with Shorts. In the last 90 days, the number of YouTube videos posted to the platform with “#Shorts” was up 51% compared to the 90-day period before that, based on a study of 1.6 million YouTube Videos from more than 11,000 YouTube accounts, according to Conviva Social Insights.

NowThis’s Shorts strategy is to post the same or similar content to what it posts on TikTok on YouTube Shorts, with a slight variance in cadence, according to a spokesperson from the brand’s parent company Vox Media. The strategy seems to have worked well for the publisher. The main driver of NowThis’’ viewership and subscriber growth on YouTube this year was Shorts, the spokesperson said, adding that NowThis increased its YouTube subscriptions by 50% compared to 2021. 

Vox Media’s other brands, Eater and The Dodo, have taken a more bespoke approach to Shorts content, using the long-form videos it posts on YouTube to inform the most interesting or engaged-with moments and then creating 60-second clips from that. This strategy has yielded more than 1 million views on many of the brands’ Shorts videos, the company’s spokesperson said.

A shortcut to build up non-Shorts businesses

Team Whistle has leaned into creating original content — both editorial and branded videos — by using the YouTube Shorts video editor and tools to make the content feel organic to the platform. And while the publisher is seeing a solid uptick in viewers who watch its Shorts content first, a big focus for the company is to reel those viewers in to longer-form videos on its various channels.

In 2022, 74% of Team Whistle’s views on YouTube were on Shorts, while 78% of its channel’s watch time (minutes viewed) was on its long-form videos. What’s more, 85% of total subscriptions to Team Whistle’s YouTube channel came through Shorts this year. 

“You can pull people in with Shorts but you can keep them staying longer with the long form,” said Dustin Fleischman, evp of revenue and brand strategy at Team Whistle. This gives YouTube the upper hand compared to TikTok or Instagram, where long-form content isn’t supported. 

Betches Media only has about 12,000 followers across its YouTube channels. But in an effort to build up its presence on the platform and participate in a revenue-share program, the company began posting video recordings of its popular podcast shows including “U Up?” in October. In addition to full episodes on its main YouTube channel, edited-down clips from those podcasts were posted on Shorts. Spiegel said that Shorts played a major role in bringing 6,000 new subscribers to the publisher’s “U Up?” YouTube channel. 

Nick Cicero, vp of strategy at Conviva, said podcast highlights are performing really well on Shorts because they have a high tendency to get viewers over to the full-length episodes on publishers’ main channels.

“Depending on what type of publisher you are, you’re going to start to use Shorts differently. [Some] are going to use Shorts as a marketing vehicle,” such as HBO Max or a podcast publisher, Cicero said. But many digital publishers may be in a position to benefit from this direct monetization of Shorts content depending on how much they invest in original content, he added. 

“We’re also seeing new accounts just being opened up for Shorts, specifically,” he said, adding that digital publishers who have a vertical focus and can use Shorts to dig down into recipes, sports highlights or other niche topics could be able to not only accrue viewers on Shorts, but keep them staying longer on Shorts content versus having them move over to long-form videos. 

Nintendo did not immediately return a request for comment.

The fracas surrounding the Smash World Tour highlights Nintendo’s uniquely skeptical approach to competitive gaming. Unlike other publishers such as Activision Blizzard and Riot Games, which have pumped millions of dollars into organizing and marketing esports leagues for their titles, Nintendo has never run its own competitive tournament or offered prize support to grassroots Smash events.

At times, Nintendo has actively worked against the competitive Smash scene. When Evolution Championship Series 2013 hosted a Smash bracket, Nintendo tried to force the event not to stream the tournament, only to reverse the decision after receiving backlash from the online gaming community.

Antipathy toward competitive Smash notwithstanding, it is likely that Nintendo will eventually have to embrace esports as a potential revenue stream and marketing channel, much like it gradually reversed its policy against film adaptations of its intellectual properties. But the competitive Smash scene is used to organizing its own events and negotiating its own brand partnerships independently of Nintendo. The blow-up of the Smash World Tour shows what happens when the cold realities of the gaming business collide with the passion of a grassroots community.

For the latest edition of Digiday’s Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for candor, Digiday spoke to a Super Smash Bros. tournament organizer to explore how Nintendo’s involvement — or lack thereof — has stymied the growth of the game’s vibrant esports scene.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you summarize Nintendo’s involvement in the competitive Smash scene for me?

They shut down The Big House Online. They banned Major League Gaming from streaming Super Smash Bros. Brawl. They tried to shut down the EVO Super Smash Bros. Melee stream. They prevented the scene from using UCF [a modified version of the game that fixes controller issues], and thus we have to use a stealth version of UCF to avoid Nintendo’s wrath.

With all this in mind, were you surprised by the cancellation of the Smash World Tour?

Yes, I was very surprised by the news. Every single event [in the circuit] prior to the championship ran as intended, and there seemed to be no complications publicly.

Nintendo told the Smash World Tour that it rejected its license application due to safety and security concerns. Did the company have legitimate reasons to feel this way?

I mean, yeah. Do you think Nintendo is OK with a top player walking onstage at [Smash tournament] Double Down coughing up blood and having the venue staff do nothing about it, or letting [YouTuber] Technicals sneak into the venue as a banned player? Does that sound like something that Nintendo would be fine with, with regard to safety guidelines? That is one of the reasons Nintendo did not want to give them a license.

Nintendo also expressed concerns over tournaments’ use of modified versions of Smash. Haven’t some licensed events in the Panda Cup used game mods like UCF?

Yes. Additionally, [Smash World Tour organizer Calvin “GimR” Lofton] did literally everything that he could do to prevent Nintendo’s wrath. He told every single person who ever appeared on stream not to talk about netplay, not to talk about any modification of the game. He went as far as to prevent Nintendo-branded things from appearing on the stream — for example, he rejected the idea of commentators wearing Pikachu and Mario costumes because he didn’t want any potential issues. 

The Smash World Tour and Panda Cup were both attempts to elevate Smash to the level of other mainstream esports. Is this something the Smash scene needs or wants?

In a vacuum, I think that every top player, every commentator, every person who has done anything administrative for the scene, would like more money. A lot of the great tournaments that we have experienced over the years have all operated on a loss. Most players after rank 11 make less than minimum wage off of Smash. So the blanket answer to the question of whether we want to be a legitimate esport and get developer support and money is a resounding yes. 

Do we need more money? No. We survived during quarantine, when there were no tournaments whatsoever. People keep giving this analogy that Melee is like a cockroach, and that you just can’t kill us, and I think that’s correct. We’ll just go back to some dirty little hole, some crevice of a wall of a murky apartment building. We don’t need the developer support.

How has Nintendo’s lack of support shaped the evolution of the Smash scene?

I’m going to give an example of a different company, Capcom. They’re the developer of Street Fighter, and Capcom supports competitive Street Fighter. So when Street Fighter 4 came out, everyone moved to Street Fighter 4. When Street Fighter 5 came out, everyone moved to Street Fighter 5. 

The Smash community is still split between Melee, the 21-year-old GameCube version of the game, and Ultimate, the newest edition. Are you saying that Nintendo’s lack of support is a cause for this split?

Yes. If Nintendo supported MLG for Brawl, and then continued to put a bunch of money into the game for Ultimate, there would not be nearly as committed and thriving of a Melee scene as there is right now.

Without developer support, how can the Smash esports scene continue to expand in the future?

I think the ideal future for the Smash scene lies in independent influencers. Hopefully, we get more influencers and YouTubers — more Ludwigs — to support our scene, and not an actual company.