Online games, a new strategy to increase media audiences and subscriber loyalty

Faced with an unending crisis, the media have no choice but to reinvent themselves and try new strategies. One of them is the integration of online gaming platforms into audience retention strategies. By seeking out new players with crossword puzzles and games such as Sudoku, publishers hope to encourage them to read news articles and become loyal readers.

It is a fairly new strategy in the European market, but it has already proven itself in the United States, notably with The New York Times. The American giant launched its dedicated games application back in 2009. Fifteen years later, the results are incredible. The app claimed more than 2.6 million active users and was downloaded 10 million times in 2023. It was such a success that in December, visitors spent more time in the NYT games app than in the NYT news app, according to data published by YipitData.

In Europe, we have seen more and more media trying to develop their online gaming platform in recent years. “It is a trend in Europe,” confirmed Ivanna Sol Barbagallo, business development and chief marketing officer at Mind Training, a company specialising in games for news media. “It’s interesting what’s happening because it is a field that is not fully discovered, and the potential that games have for news media as a product to engage and have a better relationship with the audience is huge.”

Based in Barcelona, Mind Training ​​provides complete gaming platforms to major media outlets, mainly in Spanish, such as El País. Every platform is always composed of several games. “This has a cost for the media, but it’s affordable knowing that it is for growing your audience,” said Barbagallo. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report noted that games can indeed be an effective strategy for attracting readers who are hesitating whether to buy a subscription.

Create an addiction

Games can bring traffic, which must then be converted into subscriptions to ultimately generate revenue. There are different ways to do it. Some media offer games completely free, others with paid options or subscriptions, a model similar to that of the paywalls.

The French daily newspaper, Ouest-France, has developed a diversified online gaming platform in recent years. Half of the games are free, and behind that, there is a whole strategy to gradually bring users towards a subscription. “The first objective is to interest the audience and make them come back as regularly and for as long as possible,” explained Pierre-Emmanuel Chevalier, head of the digital acquisition department at Ouest-France. 

Everything is actually based on our desire for discovery, fueled by dopamine. This neurotransmitter is often reduced to its role as a reward hormone, but it’s also the fuel for anticipation and curiosity. Games and social media use this powerful strategy to keep users engaged by feeding our desire for discovery and fulfillment.

Once this dopamine is active and the players have created a routine, it is now time to switch step by step to subscriptions. For this, Ouest-France is banking on game options, statistics, rankings, or even other games, which are accessible only after creating an account. “The game mechanic will encourage [players] to create an account with their email. In the conversion tunnel, it’s a step forward. Then we can expose our content more easily to this audience, to finally push them on a subscription mechanism,” Chevalier says.

Making bridges with news 

One of the goals of these games is also to lead players to news content. “We see that the people we attract through games are users who have a high engagement rate and who, surprisingly, will consume more articles than people who naturally do not play games,” said Pierre-Emmanuel Chevalier. Several strategies exist to encourage these players to read news articles. Some media send a weekly newsletter to game subscribers to expose them to different news stories across the news. Others show at the top of the screen a preview of the newspaper of the day when users play. 

Another solution is to include news directly in the games. For example, Ouest-France offers a game called “mystery photo of the day”. Each day, users need to find the date and location of a pre-selected photo, originally published as an illustration in an article. At the end of the game, the user is returned to the article in question. “It’s a pretext to show them that this photo is in this article. For us, it’s a way to get them to discover our articles,” explained Chevalier. 

Beyond that, what makes a game a “good” game, according to Ivanna Sol Barbagallo, is the difficulty of completing it. “[Good] games make people keep trying and trying. So in the end, they spend a lot of time on the platform, so that’s a lot of audience if you have advertisements there.” With an increasingly growing offering and online games easily accessible on the internet, specialists advise offering a diversity of games, some with unique media branding, to improve loyalty. What was still a niche a few years ago, is now becoming the norm in the biggest European media.

Source of the cover photo: Tim FosterHire via Unsplash

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