The Military History field has seen an enormous boom in popularity in the last 20 years, especially helped by the rise of the internet and two of its applications: blogs and Youtube.
However, one of the best aspects of this growth is not so much the growth of quantity, but the growth in quality! While there are more low-quality poor information website and Youtube channels available than ever, there are also a lot of very high quality highly reputable ones coming up as well. And if their existence is not enough, they also do tend to be quite popular! Youtube channels such as The Chieftain, Kings and Generals, Forgotten Weapons and Military History Visualized, and hundreds of quality history blogs garner hundreds of thousands of views while being historically accurate and doing in-depth analysis of a lot of aspects of history and technology that have just been ignored up to now.
The rise of Youtube and the appearance of a number of highly-popular historically-based games have also given rise to a large number of gamer Youtube channels focusing on this niche of the market.
Marketing agencies call such channels, websites and persons ‘influencers’, due to their large popularity and ability to influence their respective audiences, making them attractive targets for focused marketing campaigns.
Such channels and websites used to be supported by ad revenue from Google and Youtube Ads. However, not only has revenue from such sources shrunk significantly in the last years but Google, Youtube, and Facebook have turned more and more against history channels, demonetizing them or limiting their organic growth.
This has left open only two options for such creators, crowdfunding (which has picked up tremendously in the last years and have allowed the average person to become a patron of history) and influencer marketing. The latter basically consists of a partnership between the creator and a brand for advertising. The Chieftain and Wargaming, various tank Youtubers and War Thunder, everybody else and Raid: Shadow Legends are just a couple of examples of such collaborations.
Of course, ideally, every creator would like to work with brands that are close to his topic, but that is not always possible, as unfortunately, except for the large video games, the military history sector is economically rather weak. Casinos, academic writing websites, and many others will try to tempt creators into publishing unmarked guest posts, but that is often hurtful both to the creator and to the readers.
Fortunately, websites such as Intellifluence exist, which allow brands to make contact with influencers and prepare campaigns in a manner that benefits both of them. For example, our research work involves a lot of working with military history books, and we would love to do guest posts for book publishers and authors! Intellifluence even has an easy tutorial for such brands to set-up marketing campaigns for their books!
This guest post has been sponsored by Intellifluence.
One reply on “(Advertisement) Military History and Influencers”
It is good to see that popular content creators receive academic respect they deserve. There is huge issue within the industry of obscurantism and elitism. Some people have this tendency to deem all sources they do not like as poor and wrong despite not being able to answer anything raised in them. This can be seen from people in defense industry deflect any critique by using “classified” information card rather than being able to answer any concerns raised by people outside their own circles.