How To Play Candy Crush For A Living

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If you grew up obsessed with playing video games, you probably entertained fantasies of doing it professionally.

Maybe you dreamt of becoming a professional video game tester? Maybe a developer, an e-sports superstar or even YouTube gamer?

Most likely you never did any of those things and you’re currently sitting in a cubicle day-dreaming how you can make a living playing Candy Crush.

I’m here to tell you that you can…

The niche business idea I’m going to discuss today is, broadly, video games.

My Video Overview

You might think that the video game niche is really played out and competitive, with huge gaming sites soaking up all the traffic.

Yes, that’s partly true.

But- there are some interesting angles to take to be competitive in this niche. I discovered this idea recently scrolling through Flippa, the eBay of online businesses. I stumbled across this mobile gaming site (the auction page has since been deleted) that routinely gets over half a million Page Views a month.

This site focuses on the mobile game Candy Crush.  And it has absolutely insane organic traffic rankings.

Check out some of their rankings:

View Detailed Keyword Breakdown

They are capitalizing on Candy Crush’s almost infinite level count. According to this site Candy Crush has 3,175 levels!

As you can see, AppTipper traffic comes from walkthrough/guide long-tail traffic with Keyword Difficulty scores of ZERO.

Here’s their level guide for level 3,005, for example. Make sure Ad Block is enabled!

Clearly, every imaginable permutation of Candy Crush level gets hundreds and even thousands of searches and no one is creating content for these queries.

And if you check out some of their metrics from Flippa below, you can see that they get 88% of their traffic from organic search, with 425,416 Page Views in November 2017 earning them $3,807.

Traffic Stats

I’ve collected some traffic & analytics information from Flippa and Ahrefs.

According to Ahrefs, the site ranks for 39,000 keywords at the time of this writing in January 2018:

From the auction page you can see a detailed traffic breakdown from December 2016:

Financials

Helpfully, Flippa gathers financial information and you can see the site is making between $2,400 and $4,192 a month from ad revenue.

If you think this is a cool idea, give me a share. I’d appreciate it!

The Takeaway

So- an interesting angle you can take with mobile, console or PC games is to do level guides. You can also do video game reviews and other types of content- but the equation I really endorse here is targeting the low-hanging SEO fruit.

These will be ultra-low competition searches. That’ll get you the traffic, but what about monetization?

This Candy Crush walkthrough site has some really obnoxious ads- including a video ad that plays as soon as the page loads using a paid video player.

They’re really aggressive with the ads and are currently making over a thousand dollars a month, according to the seller, from just the video ads.

Traffic + Ads = Profit.​

That’s the recipe.

Why I Like This Niche

• Fun niche: If you like video games, this is a great niche for you
• Low SEO competition
• Opportunity to rake in traffic from YouTube

Why I Don’t Like This Niche

• You will most likely need to do your own video walkthroughs, outsource them, or risk depending on a third party YouTuber for content
• You’ll need lots of traffic before you can quit your job using display ads- think at least over 500,000 monthly page views

The opportunity

If you’re nuts about video games, but don’t quite have the skills to be a professional e-gaming celebrity, you can still make a living in the video game industry.

You also don’t need to become a viral YouTuber.

A lot of video gamers limit themselves to YouTube, but as we’ve seen examining the Candy Crush keyword volumes, there are lots of organic search queries occurring outside of YouTube for video game content.

I’d advise selecting a genre of games to niche down to- choose a brandable domain name like VideoGamer.com to avoid copyright infringement and penning yourself into a particular game. Then you can start writing up the walkthroughs. There are some games that won’t require video, but there are many that will.

There are a couple of ways you can go about this. For example, take Call of Duty WWII, there’s a level called “Hill 493”. You could use one of the many YouTube videos online, embed it on your site, and write up your own 300+ word narration of the walkthrough:

A caveat, however, is that you might want to connect with the YouTuber prior to embedding their videos. If you depend too much on one YouTuber for your content, they could switch off embedding and you’ll lose ALL of your third-party content. Now, you’ll want to put some thought into structuring this content. Wikia.com has a nice structure for their walkthroughs- that’s also a really important consideration when creating one of these styles of sites.

They have a page for the Single Player Levels and if you click into a specific level like Hill 493 it has a ton of information, including a video walkthrough. The general idea here is to choose a genre of video games, focus on these low-competition walkthrough searches, and build out a site that satisfies searchers. Wikipedia has a list of all video games you can peruse if you need some motivation picking a niche.

Choose a game with lots of levels people are searching for and create pages targeting those levels. It’s as simple as that.

How to get traffic

You’ll target low competition walkthrough searches and write up 300+ word landing pages with video walkthroughs.

While the Call Of Duty example has some robust players in the space like Wikia, it’s really easy to rank for the search term “Candy Crush 1374” with 1,900 searches a month.

Because the game has thousands of levels! Crazy organic ranking opportunity. If you produce your own videos, you can rake in tons of YouTube traffic, as well. For mobile games, Apple provides a way to record your screen. So if you’ve reached Legend status on Clash of Clans, consider screen-recording some of your in-field domination and monetizing that content!

How to make money

Display ads will be your best bet here. The more content you have on page, the more ads you can reasonably serve.

To be fair, you’ll need a good dose of traffic before these ads will begin paying off- so you’ll need several thousand a day before you start seeing real money.

In addition, the more page views you get, the more money you’ll earn- so a friendly site structure is crucial here.

You’ll want your users flowing through your site to increase your RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) as well as boost the number of ad clicks you get. On the affiliate side of things, you can be an affiliate for certain games. There are also affiliate networks for app installs- this site has a good writeup on them. iTunes has an affiliate program, as well.

App Install Ad Networks

• Facebook App Install Ads
• Twitter App Install Ads
• Snapchat Ads
• Google Universal App Campaigns
• Pinterest Promoted App Pins
• InMobi
• Tapjoy
• Chartboost
• Adcash
• Appnext
• Leadbolt
• Applovin
• myDSP
• Mobvista
• Startapp
• Instal
• GOWIDE
• PropellerAds
• Mobobeat
• Appness
• Yeahmobi
• PassionTeck
• Mpire Network
• Clickky
• Iconpeak
• DAU-UP ClicksMob
• MiniMob
• Digital turbine
• Consumer Acquisition
• Avazu
• ironSource
• AppBrain
• AppThis

If you like this niche idea, let me know in the comments. If you think it’s cool, give me a share. I’d really appreciate it!

Last Updated on July 8, 2021 by Ryan Nelson