Freemium Gaming and Digital Advertising

Online shooters such as Player Unkown: Battleground, fortnite and Apex have completely revolutionized the online gaming world by introducing free, robust online gaming platforms (or in the case of PUBG, inexpensive). Check out the numbers of active players first:

Fortnite boasts roughly 250 million registered users worldwide
PUBG maintains a daily rate of 30 million users with 250 million registered users
Apex Legends launched on february 5th, took 8 hours to reach its first million users, 24 hours to reach 2.5 million users, and 72 hours to reach 10 million. One month after launch, they had 50 million users.

So how do they do it?

It's simple, they created breathtaking, quality, content and use a variety of digital advertising initatives to push the messaging. All the while, pushing an overarching message of "Why the hell would you pay for someone else's game when you can have this badass shit for free (or, at least, way cheaper than the $90 you'd spend on a new game elsewhere)?"
I first heard about Apex Legends through the Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. They were extremely effective using paid social to push their messaging well in advance of their launch date that I had my hard drive cleared and ready to download on February 3rd. I was so captivated by the textures and in-game features that made it a combination of all my favorite shooters (Battlefield, Rainbow6 Siege, Fortnite, and Borderlands).
The Respawn Entertainment group really invested in digital marketing and the efforts paid of in a big way as you can see from the aforementioned results. Broadly interest targeted advertising was pushed on all platforms and boy, did they ever know their audience.
This is why it pays to invest in digital advertising; not only are you pushing your product but you're investing in the data and using that data to make business decisions, all while maintaining a net-positive ROI.
Maybe your business isn't gaming, maybe it's B2B or B2C but you should be investing in digital marketing as a huge portion of your marketing spends. It's high ROI, measurable and gives you a whole swath of data you didn't previously have. Here's another blog detailing more paid social info