CASE STUDY: Yogscast.com Website Design, Development & Gamified Social Community Platform

OVERVIEW

The Yogscast are a network of talented and entertaining YouTube producers, committed to bringing the best in gaming entertainment to the world. The main Yogscast YouTube channel is the first ever UK channel to hit one billion video views. The Yogscast appeal extends well beyond the gaming community and also has a substantial following of non-gamers around the globe. The BBC estimates that more than 3 million people tune into Yogscast videos every day and industry experts estimate their annual revenue exceeds $5M.

Working with Yogscast’s US partner, Maker Studios, Angelsmith designed, developed and launched a brand new version of the Yogscast.com website — the leading online destination for Minecraft game players, with millions of site views and downloads each month.

RESULTS

The website delivers fun, engaging, character-driven design and a top-notch social user experience for Yogscast’s very active global community to find, participate and consume the site’s content. The redesign also makes Yogscast products more easily accessible to community members, resulting in a dramatic increase in e-commerce sales.

The enterprise level website delivers a fully-immersible environment, enabling the popular game play-throughs to be displayed and managed, all without moving visitors off-site to outside locations such as YouTube. It merges all the previously separate social elements of the community into one site, which in turn encourages advocate activation and revenue growth.

APPROACH

Using the Drupal-based Anvil platform, Angelsmith designed and developed a site that reflects the beloved Yogscast brand – quirky, irreverent, off-beat and fun — while delivering a highly scalable web infrastructure that sustains ~275,000 unique visitors each day. Key site features include:

• Video Content: organization, presentation and searching, to drive monetization via advertising, brand deals, and e-commerce.
• Social Integration: facilitates sharing across Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
• Single Sign On (SSO) and Community Integration: SSO between the main site (Drupal) and integration with forums (vBulletin).
• Separate Web and Mobile Site Templates: ensuring a high-quality user experience on both platforms.

TIMING

Launched late 2012.