invest in advertising on YouTubers' channels
Advertising is an inherently risky business, whether you are a Minecraft server or a large company. In order for advertising to be successful you need to understand not only what you want to achieve but how you want to go about achieving it; your strategy is dependent on what your end goal is. The reason that advertising is difficult is because you often have to spend money to generate leads or to increase your exposure, whether it comes in the form of endorsements, banners on websites or any other form of advertising you can think of. Advertising is not free, and it's certainly not cheap. To convince a Youtuber to play on the server you have to show them that there is something they can benefit from in facilitating that exposure, usually with large or well-known Youtubers that will be financial benefit. You could however approach a smaller, less well-known Youtuber to come to the server. Whilst this would bring a much smaller interest from their audience relative to the size of their channel in comparison to a more 'famous' Minecraft Youtuber, the benefit of them playing on Massivecraft is that they get access to new content which they can post to grow their audience. The more money you spend, the better results you get - a small / new Youtuber would be cheaper if not free, but the engagement Massivecraft would get from it would be very small. This strategy would be beneficial to the Factions player-base but it is extremely difficult to advertise the immersion and quality of Massivecraft's Roleplay community. Unfortunately it is not the type of content people would enjoy watching as it involves personal investment and lots of typing, it is very much a niche medium people have to try for themselves to assess.
advertising to the social medias
People often consider Social Media platforms to be free advertising, as you don't have to spend a penny on posting things across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, PMC, etc., but this is a common misconception. Social Media requires the poster to generate their own engagements and relies heavily on their audience to repost and share their content in order to reach wider interactions without having to spend money promoting posts. The Massivecraft Twitter page is relatively new but only has 12 followers, the majority of which are likely current players. The Facebook page has an impressive 3,162 followers but has been around since 2011 meaning players will have come and gone since liking the page, some people will like it in passing and many of the other likes will be again from current players. To truly 'advertise' on social media, you need to promote posts which of course requires spending, or you need to find ways of getting your current audience to share content in order to exploit their existing connections. This is easier said than done.
So, what can / should we do?
I have spent a while critiquing both of these forms of advertising for bringing in new players but my analysis hasn't really answered the question of what Massivecraft should do to achieve that. I am fully in agreement that we should be looking to grow the player-base but the first step is player retention - we cannot hope to bring in new players if people are still leaving. This is a step that I know the entire Staff Team have worked hard on over the last 12 months; Game have hosted a number of events and assisted in the progression of the Factions world, the Quest team has grown and are delivering regular quest lines, World staff have built huge and amazing districts and continue to make Massivecraft more beautiful, Tech have brought us new features, Lore have released and redesigned essential pieces to improve Roleplay and PR have been putting out internal content to keep forum activity high.
I don't think I'm the only one that believes that Massivecraft continues to improve as time goes on. Internal content is crucial for player retention and the Staff team have done an excellent job at developing every side of the server in order to maintain interest. When the internal focus is deemed to be less of a necessity by Staff, that is when they will likely begin pursuing external methods of approach to bring in new people.
As far as what we as players can do to help, we should actively encourage people to join or try out the server, share social media posts and make videos of our own. We are a community after all so if we want it to grow, it is as much our responsibility to look for creative and engaging ways of bringing in new players as much as it is the Staff team's.
