Bylined Guest Placements in Games and Sport Press

Expect the first byline live in week six, and four to seven pieces across a quarter. Editors at the publications worth appearing in commission two to four months ahead, and follow-up does not compress that. Whose name goes on it: The byline belongs to a named person inside your company: a studio technical director, a head of live operations, a sports physiologist, a rights lawyer. I do not write under a founder who cannot defend the argument in the comments or on a podcast the week after. The piece is built from something only that person holds. The post-mortem on a launch that went badly. What a live-ops change did to day-30 retention. Why the matchmaking rewrite failed twice before it worked. That is the only reason an editor at GamesIndustry.biz, Gamereactor, Esports Insider or the Nordic trade press runs a contributed article at all. How a placement is built: Two recorded calls with your expert, 45 minutes each. From the transcript I find the single claim a working editor would run with, and write a 150-word pitch around that claim before any article exists. The pitch goes to a named editor with a commissioning history I can point to, never to a submissions inbox. If three editors pass, the pitch was wrong and I rewrite the pitch. I do not lower the publication. What I refuse: Any title with a write-for-us page, a contributor rate card, or a sponsored-content disclosure applied across the whole site. Any site where the last forty contributed posts share an author-bio pattern ending in a commercial anchor, which is inventory rather than press. I will not place for betting, casino or real-money gaming brands in any market: the same editors serve the video games and esports clients here, and those relationships do not survive it. Also refused: word-count minimums, a link in the second paragraph because a ranking page needs it, and approval of the finished piece by your legal team after the editor has scheduled it. One contextual mention, agreed with the editor, in the place the editor puts it. Not included: Translation into Danish, Swedish or Norwegian. I write and pitch in English. A standing content calendar for your own blog. Press office duty, since I am not on call for reactive comment. Newsroom contacts transfer to you in the handover document rather than as an introduction I broker forever. What counts as delivered: A placement counts when the article is live, the byline is correct, the mention resolves to the agreed URL, and the page is indexed, verified in Search Console and by a site query rather than by screenshot. I re-check every placement at day 120. Articles pulled, un-bylined or moved behind a paywall inside that window are replaced, and I report them rather than waiting for you to find them. Who this is not for: A company with nobody inside it willing to speak on record. A team working against a monthly link target. The count is small deliberately, and the argument for this work is that four articles by a named engineer in the trade press change how your company gets described in search results and in AI-generated answers, which forty unread placements do not. If your board measures this in units, buy units elsewhere and pay less for them. Reporting: One page per placement: pitch sent, editor, commissioning date, live URL, rel attribute, indexation status, referral sessions at day 30 from your own analytics, and whether anything else has since cited the piece. Delivered as a sheet you keep.