In the span of a few short years, mobile gaming has transformed from a small, obscure industry into one of the most crowded, competitive and lucrative areas online. The market's sudden growth has produced its toughest obstacle; the issue of discoverability. Simply put, discoverability defines a producer's ability to market a product before a constant flood of new entries drowns it out. Compacting the issue is the incredibly upward trajectory of online video creators.
Hundreds of endeavoring comedians, filmmakers and personalities now make a well-paid living producing and posting online videos over YouTube. While a select few have used this as a springboard to TV, many more have called YouTube home and focused on creating a cottage industry based on ad sales, merchandising and sponsorship deals. In today's evolving digital landscape, mobile gaming and short-form online programming have a real opportunity to leverage each other's value and package an entirely new product that extends profitability and shelf life.
As this growing online community matures into a larger business, the next logical question for many is how to expand beyond the scope of YouTube. Just as social gaming empires Zynga and Crowdstar are carefully growing their presence outside Facebook, so too have many YouTube creators in considering branching beyond their own businesses. After all, there is nothing to prevent YouTube from fundamentally altering its own ecosystem.
Although the two groups rarely mix, online video creators and the mobile gaming community are both populated by creative, entrepreneurial mindsets; kindred souls if you will, who have staked out new, previously uninhabited professional fields. Working together, mobile apps can be built around a video creator's persona and marketed on a 24/7 platform in front of millions of viewers. Additionally, the immediate, open discourse between a video creator and his/her viewers can allow for much more responsive feedback than the user comment system in the Apple App Store or Android Marketplace.
For online video creators, the collaboration can expand their businesses beyond those of video sharing sites as well as help demonstrate that their audiences are loyal, and, perhaps more importantly, willing to purchase a product with their distinctive creative DNA.
As the mobile app space grows increasingly competitive, the need to solve the discoverability issue becomes more pressing and as the brand power of content creators proceeds to flourish, the desire to expand onto other platforms becomes the next step in their evolution. Viewing each other as creative partners can get them to where they both want to go while delivering innovation in a space that's ripe for unlimited development.