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Viral marketing has become synonymous with often funny or controversial online videos. Due to over saturation, achieving good results with commercial viral videos however is becoming more and more difficult. Viral games on the other hand are far from the saturation point, and with video games being a massively growing market, they’re doing better than ever, here’s why:

Viral games are much easier to seed successfully

Because of the many high traffic online games community sites and portals that are constantly looking for new content it’s easy to get you game featured. These website will often feature new games on the front page, providing massive amounts of traffic to your viral game and potentially getting your game played by millions worldwide. Try getting on the front page of YouTube or any of the other high profile video sharing sites and see how far you get. The sheer volume of submissions the video sharing sites get makes it virtually impossible to get anywhere near the front page, which means your video just gets lost amongst millions of others.

Viral games get consistently higher viewing figures

The ease of seeding and the fact that there is less competition means viral games typically get many times more views than videos. Millions (or even tens of millions) of worldwide plays are commonplace with viral games. Getting those sorts of numbers with viral videos is impossible for all but a handful of the very best viral videos.

You can embed clickable links in a viral game

Viral games can have clickable web links embedded within them and clickthrough rates are very good. Typically many times better than other forms of online advertising such as banner ads at around 10%. The problem with viral videos is you can’t include these clickable links. The best you can do is include a URL and hope. Clickable web links in viral games provide many times the referral traffic of a video because of this.

Viral games are interactive

Rather than just have your audience passively view your advert, viral games encourage interaction with your brand to provide a much more engaging experience. This often makes viral games much more memorable and increases the chance of repeat plays.

Viral games are much more cost effective

Given the above and the fact that production costs are similar, viral games give you a much better return on your investment. Viral games consistently reach a much larger audience for roughly the same cost as viral videos.

You can accurately track results with viral games

Unlike viral videos you can use a viral tracking service (by embedding a couple of lines of code) to track detailed, accurate results of who sees your campaign. You can see details of geographical location, view time, interactions (such as web link clickthroughs), etc. across hundreds of websites, all through one dashboard. This is invaluable for measuring the success of any viral marketing campaign. None of this is easily possible with viral videos.

Viral videos can be used to promote games but not vice versa

This may sound like a slight contradiction, but viral games can actually utilise viral video marketing to increase plays with little additional cost. We often use gameplay videos to get extra traffic to a viral game. Because it’s literally a video screen capture from the game there is very little work (and therefore cost) involved in adding this to a viral game.

Although videos are the first thing that spring to mind when you mention viral marketing, games are definitely more effective and worthy of your marketing budget.

Simon Walklate is a partner in UK based online game developer The Motion Monkey who specialise in viral game design.