It’s an accomplishment to get millions of gamers to watch a blank screen, as Fortnite did during the weekend of October 12.
As audiences were expecting news about Season 11, they were met with a black hole and a blank screen — an explosion, then a significant amount of nothing. According to video measurement company Tubular Labs, Instagram and YouTube videos around the initial event collected 33 million views. And October 14 wound up being the biggest day for Fortnite-related videos since July 1, with 389 million views across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube that day.
Each month, GamesBeat partners with Tubular Labs and CreatorIQ to provide a recap of the month’s most interesting social media trends in gaming.
“Chapter 2,” which arrived on October 15, continued some of that momentum. Six different videos from Fortnite received at least one million views between October 15 and 16, and Fortnite-related videos still generated at least 200 million views per day on both days.
The uptick is a welcome surge for the Epic Games property, as monthly social video views have been cut in half for Fortnite from Jan. (8.6 million views) through September 2019 (4.3 million views). It remained the top gaming brand across platforms in that time. However, the lead has certainly shrunk over the past nine months.
Such a downturn hasn’t stopped certain Fortnite influencers from continuing to put up big numbers on social video, however. With Ninja operating more on Mixer of late, creators like BCC Trolling have emerged as top influencers around the game.
BCC Trolling has more than 10.6M YouTube subscribers on its Fortnite-focused channel, with videos generating 2.2M views and more than 51K “likes” on average. The channel’s engagement rate hovers around 2.53%, which is right in the sweet spot for YouTube, according to influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ.
Fornite’s also not the only game to be getting attention on social video platforms. Over the summer, Grand Theft Auto 5 — originally released in 2014 — jumped back on audiences’ radars by way of entertaining content with Marvel’s Spider-Man. The mods, created by a variety of different channels, including ZBGames, feature mods of Spider-Man inserted into GTA 5 with various comic falls. One creator (ZB Games), in particular, collected over 70 million views from the trend. The top video in the last 90 days was “GTA 5 Funny Spiderman ragdolls vol.3” (46.7 million).
The popularity of the videos lifted ZB Games from short of 9,000 followers in July, to over 176,000 in August.
Also, while highlighting certain creators, it’s worth noting that PewDiePie continues to reign as the top gaming influencer across platforms according to Tubular. Still, plenty of other accounts rise in the margins based on the strength of certain game titles — or the appeal of having content in non-English languages.
Chilean YouTuber JuegaGerman generates over 150 million views per month on his Spanish-language channel, and has climbed 12 spots on Tubular’s gaming leaderboard since Sept. 2018. Though English videos dominate gaming videos, it’s far from the only language in the genre. On YouTube, English-language videos make up just over half of the total uploads for gaming in 2019, with Russian, Japanese, Spanish and Portugese are over 5% each. Over on Facebook, English-languge videos make up over a third of the gaming category. However, Spanish is over 10%, while Portugese and Vietnamese are both over 5%.
Per CreatorIQ, JuegaGerman’s YouTube channel has an “excellent” engagement rate of 8.16% on recent videos. Looking at his social audience, 22% come from Mexico, 17% from Argentina and 9% from both Chile and Colombia. His followers skew slightly male (53%), with 47% between the ages of 18 and 24 and 32% under 18.
Author: John Cassillo
Source: Venturebeat
