The Good the Bad and the Ugly

October 6th, 2018

We’re going to continue looking at how YouTube celebrities can be an amazing asset to companies when it comes to advertising. As I mentioned in my last post there are YouTubers that focus their whole account to them playing video games and no video game YouTuber has become a bigger celebrity than Ninja. He is a YouTuber that has turned him playing a game Called Fortnite into an empire, and the businesses are starting to exploit it. While the game Fortnite itself is a game that is downloadable for free but the money maker for them is an in game currency called vbucks. Vbucks are something that makes you be able to purchase in game upgrades and new clothes for your character and considering that Ninja has over 18 million followers with the vast majority being kids that play the game are dying to get the things that they see Ninja using that they will buy countless Vbucks until they get the item they want. Recently Fortnite has become playable on mobile devices and Samsung has decided to go all in with Ninja and rapper Travis Scott being the figure heads on their new TV campaign that focuses on the Fortnite capabilities of the new Galaxy phone. With the almost religious nature of how Ninja’s followers follow him there is not doubt in my mind that the amount of Fortnite specific buyer of the new Galaxy will literally be off the charts. Ninja wasn’t the first to get huge off of playing video games online, one of the most popular that even I got caught up in was back in 2014 and a few YouTubers took to playing Fifa the soccer video game that had an online gameplay mode called Ultimate Team which consisted of card like individualized players that you could get by buying “packs” the best packs obviously cost more ingame currency than the bad ones so what started happening was these YouTubers would become sponsored by “cointraders” which was outside of the actual Fifa game. Instead of doing the ingame purcahses of “Fifa points” that didn’t garuntee you anything good and could have turned out to be a waste of money these coin traders would sell the actual coins you needed to purchase the player cards and it turned into a hundreds of thousands of dollar business that actually ended up being such a big business that it took away from the people spending money on the actual in game purchases and two games later EA Sports the maker of Fifa figured out a way to ban the purchase of coins so it would stop effecting their business. The power of Social media never ceases to amaze me, good, bad or indifferent the reach for companies legit, or fraudulent is amazing. Visit me again tomorrow for the last installment in this little blog series.