How Opera GX runs 1000s of creator collaborations with Matchmade

A long-term partnership with excellent results

For several years, Opera has partnered with Matchmade to run global creator marketing campaigns to support their user acquisition, especially for Opera GX, a browser geared toward gamers, and one of Opera’s most loved products. 

Opera has taken the long-term view with creator marketing, focusing on running campaigns on a recurring basis with the goal of improving performance and scale month to month and year to year.

The multi-year partnership with Matchmade has allowed them to consistently increase their user base, now more than 20 million monthly active users, while improving campaign performance and scaling creator budgets. This includes measures such as hiring a full spectrum of creators from small to large, exploring new creator categories and topics, as well as doing different kinds of A/B testing.

Major growth in campaign scale – without increasing headcount

Thanks to Matchmade’s automated approach, Opera has been able to cost-effectively scale their creator sponsorship efforts. They now run more than 1500 sponsorships per year with Matchmade, with large monthly budgets.

Thanks to having a long-term view of building up creators as a channel, and always aiming to improve the results further, the ROI from these efforts is now consistently positive. 

Another key result for them has been that they have been able to expand marketing efforts without excessively increasing the headcount of the team or spending a fortune on agency services. As essentially no time is spent on things like negotiations with creators or handling publishing enforcement and payouts, they can focus on more essential activities such as strategy or negotiating bigger collaborations with the best-known YouTube stars.  

This approach of working with creators of all sizes has enabled them to gain much bigger reach and engagement than they could have achieved with the same budget by hiring big-name creators alone. It has also reduced the risk of needing to rely on the performance of a few big names to make or break a campaign. 

Consistent testing through increased automation

One of the biggest benefits of Matchmade for Opera is that the creator marketing process is highly automated, enabling Opera to hire a broad range of different creators with minimal time investment from the internal team. As they are responsible for several channels, this allows them to focus on broader strategies, testing, and much more.

Opera has run several experiments with Matchmade throughout the years. For example, the latest test is exploring if an optimal length can be found for Opera’s YouTube sponsorships. For example, a shorter sponsorship is easier for creators to produce, and thus typically somewhat cheaper, but it can’t communicate all of the value propositions a longer sponsorship could. A longer duration can also be beneficial for more complex products such as a web browser with advanced capabilities that faces fierce competition from big industry players like Google Chrome.