Subway Surfers · B2C · endless runner mobile game
Put a few hundred dollars behind posts already going viral
Tens of thousands of dollars total; helps hits spread to other platforms
Workedpaid-socialorganic-short-video
What they did
No standing paid UA budget. When a piece of organic content starts picking up, spend a few hundred dollars boosting it, especially to carry it to other platforms (e.g. from TikTok to Instagram). Total boosting spend is in the tens of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands or millions.
What happened
Guest says it helps content cross platforms; the flywheel otherwise runs by itself.
- Stage
- scale
- Effort
- Tens of thousands of dollars in total
“The short answer is that we spend nothing. We spend salaries-”
“when we see that some content picks up, then we might put a few hundred dollars behind it”
“So it transcends different platforms, because of course if you see it on one platform, then we see that this content could perhaps ignite on other places.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Subway Surfers: Move the game to a new city every three weeksGuest credits it with keeping the game fresh for 13 years; no numbers
- Subway Surfers: Keep the core game free and unlimited, and never lock content behind paymentTop-5 downloaded game every year since 2012; 1M installs a day
- Subway Surfers: Have a small in-house team post 5-10 videos a day riding pop culture trendsViral hits of 75M-100M views on salaries only; guest says it lifts app store featuring
- Subway Surfers: Let anyone use the game in their videos, and repost the cool onesCreators, including a K-pop star, make unpaid content; the game became a meme format
- Subway Surfers: Let players watch an ad for a reward instead of payingAds bring in 80-85% of revenue; still the top game in tier-2 and tier-3 countries
- Subway Surfers: Ask players' age, show kids only child-safe ads, and block gambling and gun adsVery few complaints across a billion ad impressions a month
- Subway Surfers: Swap characters with other hit games, with no money changing handsBrings back lapsed players and boosts both games; Crossy Road got the bigger bump
- Slopes: Sell day and season passes next to the subscription for occasional usersHost cites it as working; no numbers