Top 3 platforms to get the best gaming news in 2023

---

The gaming market is very huge and gamers look forward to social platforms with gaming news and ads. According to Gamesight CEO, Adam Lieb, for the best game ads and news, gamers should turn to TikTok. This is also supported by the company’s CMO, Nicole Yang. Lieb said

“TikTok went from having virtually no publishers working with it two years ago to a platform now that is in almost every game marketer’s budget somewhere,” … “I don’t know I’ve ever seen anything grow as fast, in terms of both prevalence and the percentage of companies on TikTok, as well as the size of budgets folks are putting into that platform.”

Top gaming news and ads platforms

1. TikTok

Last year, TikTok was quite popular and there are signs that the company will continue to grow in 2023 (this year). TikTok’s size is now great enough that it doesn’t need to grow much more to be relevant.

Lieb attributes TikTok’s success in part to its early reliance on performance marketing. Other social networks built an ad business and then gradually began to provide advertisers with more data on who was clicking on ads, whether those clicks led to sales, and so on. TikTok has always been centered on producing solutions and conversion rates. Lieb adds…

“They don’t come from a historical ‘brand awareness’ place, so the amount of emphasis put on performance matters a lot,”

According to Lieb, the maiden focus of TikTok is what the game industry needs. So the social platform has an edge over its competitors such as Facebook and Google who only developed it over time. Until recently, Twitter didn’t even offer a performance ad product for the PC and console game developers that Gamesight focuses on.

TikTok is now moving to the front seat

However, there will be some cons as TikTok moves from the bottom to the top. As it becomes the mainstay in the gaming industry for advertisers, it will likely increase its fees. Lieb added

“There are more players on the network, there are more brands who want to advertise. So sometimes performance will go down just by the nature of the inputs,” … “You’re spending more money to talk to the same people, so even if the conversion rates are the same, the cost goes up.”

At first glance, TikTok’s conversion rates aren’t very great. TikTok. Its average conversion rate was 0.96%, according to Gamesight’s 2022 Ad Network study. This is way lower than more established players like Google (3.79%), Twitch (5.5%), Facebook (3.48%), and Twitter (7.1%).

According to Lieb, the cost of a TikTok ad is way cheaper. Ads also integrate differently within the site, altering the value proposition. They are more transitory, so people miss them more readily, but there is no option to opt out of commercials on TikTok by paying a premium membership price, as there is on some other platforms. Thus, you don’t have to worry about whether the audience you’re targeting will pay a large share to avoid ads.

TikTok’s content is a little different

Also, while dealing with TikTok gaming news, most ads have to be mobile phone friendly. This is because most TikTok users often watch on their phones rather than a PC (and there’s no TikTok app for consoles yet). So there’s a lot more friction in convincing someone to buy something on the platform.

Yang said

“You’re looking at TikTok as largely an awareness push,” … “You’re looking at a high volume of being able to put out impressions there and look at a wide audience who largely have marked themselves as interested in this type of content.”

Developers must also be aware of the type of gaming news or ads they post on TikTok.

“The format [of TikTok] is a little different,” Yang says. “The format that exists there and what is topical or culturally relevant changes and is fleeting. So it is important for developers to also be aware of those macro trends in determining what type of content will work for them on a specific platform.”

2. Twitter

While Twitter may have a greater conversion rate, Lieb and Yang emphasize that it is a minor player in the grand scheme of things.

“Comparatively, Twitter’s ads revenue last year was $5 billion compared to Facebook’s $115 billion and Google’s $210 billion,” … “We see games marketing budgets correlate similarly.”

According to Gamesight, Twitter will record more stability than the market anticipates. This is due to the Musk effect as well as the aggressive matching funds programs for advertisers.

Yang said

“The platform traditionally has been hard to scale from a marketing point of view, but certainly with new products like a conversion API, it gives advertisers a reason to reinvestigate and test it as a new channel,” … “And unless there’s another black swan event and people are yeeting on Twitter altogether, we don’t assume it’s going to be that insanely volatile.”

One thing to keep in mind about all of these ad systems is that they do not all work the same way.  Considering the conversion rates, one may decide to run an ad on Twitch. However, the type of ad will significantly vary in terms of both cost and how effective the ad will be.

As Lieb says, “You can’t just say ‘How important is Twitch?’ You have to say ‘How important is each of those different types of content?'”

3. Others

There is Facebook, Twitch, Reddit and a lot of other options that will come in this category. When asked where people should be placing their ads but aren’t, Lieb says Reddit is his go-to these days. Lieb adds

“I think 2023 in a lot of ways is going to be a reset year where strategies, tactics, and budgets are scrutinized,” … “For a lot of companies, we’re seeing budgets tightened. A lot of games have been cancelled.”

With fewer games coming out, developers will need all of them to be successful, and Lieb anticipates a greater emphasis on performance marketing or provable/workable things. This means less expenditure in developing a broad brand and less testing on fresh ad concepts. He feels it will be a departure from the previous few years when everyone was riding high and trying amazing new things