@daniel So I have an Instagram account dedicated to board games. Occasionally small board game companies send me games to play with the understanding that I’ll play the games and post about them. Because modern board games are a fairly niche hobby, it only takes a few thousand followers to become enough of an “influencer” for companies to partner with you. Larger accounts (many still under 10k followers but some of the super popular board gamers influencers that I follow have over 100k followers on instagram ) will be paid to make content about games, sometimes for social media or for Kickstarter campaigns. They get invited to try games before they are released and get lots of free product. And these folks definitely influence purchasing decisions amongst fellow board gamers so they are a huge part of a game company’s marketing budget. Every hobby has their own group of influencers. In niche hobbies they may only have a few thousand followers. But in areas like makeup and fashion they may have millions of views on TikTok. It’s a really bizarre landscape. There is a woman, I believe in China, who shows each product for 1-3 seconds before moving on to the next one. She’s a big deal - though I don’t really get why. But companies pay her to show their product, just for a moment.
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