Technology
Building The Gaming Creator Infrastructure: How Cloutboost Powers Gaming Influencer Marketing
“The beauty of gaming marketing is that unlike e-commerce, where you have limited data points, gaming provides rich data about player behavior,” explains Polina Haryacha, founder & CEO of Cloutboost, a tech-enabled gaming influencer marketing agency driving creator partnerships for game publishers.
Polina explains, “With the rise of social media and the emergence of influencer marketing, in-game behavior data traditionally used for marketing analytics can now be enriched with insights into the behavior of influential gamers, their preferences, and the impact they have on their followers. It also provides a deeper understanding of gaming communities, whether centered around the games themselves or the creators who engage with them.”
Since launching in 2017, Cloutboost has transformed from a traditional gaming marketing agency into a technology platform that helps gaming companies identify, manage, and measure creator partnerships at scale. The company serves clients ranging from indie developers to AAA studios like Amazon Games and Rovio, providing them with tools to build effective creator partnerships.
The Data Challenge Behind Gaming Creator Marketing
The gaming industry bears unique challenges for creator partnerships. With over 1,500 new games published monthly on Steam alone, publishers struggle to identify suitable creators for their titles among vast content options.
According to Polina, traditional influencer marketing platforms track only 40,000-50,000 gaming creators, while Cloutboost’s database contains over 650,000 specialized gaming influencers.
“When we started in 2017, some publishers were experimenting with different types of influencers, treating it largely as an innovative and creative addition to the traditional marketing mix,” Polina recalls. “Over the last seven, eight years, it became an absolute must. Talk to anyone in the gaming space – even if it’s a one-person indie publisher – and the first thing on their mind regarding marketing is finding creators to showcase their game. At the same time, major publishers are now dedicating substantial portions of their marketing budgets to influencer marketing.”
Building Specialized Solutions
Cloutboost’s approach to addressing these challenges demonstrates the intricacy of building creator economy infrastructure. One example is their solution for identifying games that creators play in YouTube videos.
“Consider the difference between Twitch and YouTube,” Polina explains. “On Twitch, every gaming stream is associated with a game ID, allowing to clearly identify that streamer X played game Y during a specific stream. On YouTube, however, no such functionality exists within the API.”
After trying various approaches, including “keywords, description, title and even trying to transcribe the voice,” the team succeeded by manually scraping auto-generated game pages, a newer feature unavailable through the API.
“If you’re relying on third-party platform providers, there will always be a change, a challenge that you need to be prepared for,” Polina adds. “These platforms can change owners, adjust their algorithms, impose stricter API rate limits, or even revoke access entirely if terms of service aren’t met. At any moment, these shifts could threaten your business…you need to work closely with the platform to be able to work out those changes.”
This precise attention to detail and development of custom solutions extends throughout Cloutboost’s platform, with several key components:
Creator Representation Mapping
Polina notes that there are hundreds of talent agents in gaming, and each represents anywhere between several and hundreds of gaming talents. Therefore, the company maintains a comprehensive database of gaming talent agents and their rosters, providing clear visibility into creator representation.
The system updates monthly to track representation changes, allowing users to search by “Show me those represented by X talent agency” or “Show me influencers who play Fortnite, speak German, average 50,000 views, and see who represents them.”
Advanced Gaming-Specific Discovery
The platform provides specialized filters that let clients search by:
- Game titles and genres combined with detailed engagement metrics
- Gaming platforms (PC, mobile, PlayStation, etc.)
- Content themes (medieval, sci-fi, etc.) supported by publication frequency and overall activity levels.
- Gameplay frequency measurements and detailed interaction statistics
- Geographic and language reach
- Average viewership, concurrent and peak viewership, engagement rates, and recent activity.
Dynamic Analytics Dashboard
The platform’s reporting infrastructure includes:
- Daily updated metrics on views, comments, shares, and follower changes with detailed trend analysis
- Trend line analysis showing performance for the entire campaign and individual creators across various timeframes.
- Side-by-side influencer comparisons examining CPM, True Reach, engagement rates, and views
- Exportable data formatted for integration with various analytics tools
Aside from the graphs, at the bottom of the page, users can export a table form into Excel or CSV and use it with other tools.
Performance Tracking
The platform delivers additional tracking capabilities through Bitly integration. “We wrap your tracking links with a Bitly wrapper to monitor clicks,” Polina explains. “Each click on your tracking link is captured and updated in real-time. Whenever you open the report, the platform sends an API request to Bitly, ensuring you see the most up-to-date click count.”
Beyond Traditional Campaign Management
Cloutboost’s infrastructure emphasizes long-term value measurement alongside campaign metrics. “In our industry, agencies typically share a one-time PDF report with static results after a campaign launch,” Polina says. “If publishers want to track progress over the following weeks or months, they have to manually check each content piece directly on social platforms.
To provide better insights, Cloutboost developed a more comprehensive tracking system.”When content is published on YouTube or Twitch, we add the URL to our portal, which sends daily API requests to these platforms,” Polina explains.
“This system provides updates in ‘near real-time,’ consistently refreshing data daily. It tracks metrics like views, comments, shares, likes, and changes in follower counts. This data is invaluable for publishers deciding which creators to re-engage and understanding how different marketing events impact performance over time.”
The Technical Foundation
The platform rests on a robust technical infrastructure designed for creator data complexity. “During my Data Science and Engineering Master’s program at UCSD, we focused heavily on the foundational aspects of data,” Polina shares. “Around 80% of a data scientist’s work involves extracting and cleaning data. Before you can apply algorithms, derive insights, or make predictions, you need clean, structured, and up-to-date data. That takes work.”
This emphasis on data quality proves crucial as the platform grows. “To build a portal and have metrics and make decisions based on them, we need to build an infrastructure that gets data on time, the right amount of data, the accurate data, the data that doesn’t have gaps.”
Future Developments
As gaming influencer marketing advances, Cloutboost focuses on solving industry-wide challenges like attribution. “Everyone is still struggling with attribution,” Polina acknowledges. “Attributing every player to an influencer is still a struggle on every platform.”
The company expands support for indie developers, recognizing smaller studios need creator marketing tools but may lack resources for full-service agency relationships. This includes providing more affordable platform access and mentorship through partnerships with gaming organizations like La Guilde du jeu vidéo du Québec.
Cloutboost’s progression from agency to infrastructure provider indicates the broader transformation across the creator economy, where specialized tools and platforms replace manual processes to scale creator partnerships effectively.
“The gaming influencer ecosystem is massive, with countless creators, content, and layers of representation,” Polina explains. “Without the right tools, it’s impossible to see the big picture and make informed decisions.”