Most advertising a small business can actually afford shares the same problem: it shows up somewhere nobody is looking on purpose. A banner ad sits below the fold. A boosted post scrolls past in half a second. A newsletter footer gets skipped every time.
The exception is anything placed where someone is already paying attention for a different reason, and about to want something. That's the idea behind sponsoring a claw machine.
Why the moment matters more than the size
A logo on a static page is easy to ignore. A logo on the screen of a claw machine someone is actively controlling, joystick in hand, watching their own play on camera, is a different kind of visible.
Claw Catcher is still early: a little over a thousand players and 17,000+ plays so far, and growing quickly. But every one of those plays happens on a real machine with a real camera, watched live by whoever's controlling it.
Who it actually suits
This is built for anything that already lives at a link: an online shop, an app, a newsletter, a channel. The reach is a few hundred plays a month, so it suits a business happy to be found rather than one that needs people through a physical door. You can see exactly where our players come from on our live stats page.
If a screenshot or a click-through would do the job, a claw machine sponsorship gives you both, somewhere nobody expects to see them.
How the branding actually works
Sponsorship goes on the machine's own display screen, the one built into the cabinet and shown live on stream while someone plays, in your logo and colours, for the whole run. Every player gets a daily free-play allowance to compete for a spot on the leaderboard, sponsored machine or not. What sponsorship buys is being the name they see while they play: credited on the exact screen someone is looking at, for keeping that machine free to play.
Illustrative example, using a placeholder logo and colour, not a real sponsor.
The same credit follows the player off the cabinet screen and onto the page they're playing from, underneath the controls.
Illustrative example, not a real sponsor.
What it costs and how it runs
Sponsorship starts from an introductory £50, which buys 30 days or 250 plays on your machine, whichever comes first. That's the minimum, not the ceiling: commit to two or three months up front and both the term and the play allowance scale with it, at a discount. That rate is a trial price while sponsorship is new on the platform, and it's likely to rise as the player base grows. The month is the longest a run can last, not the shortest: if it's busy, players can use up your play allowance before the month is out and the run ends early.
Same signup gate as always: you can price it, choose ball colours and preview your logo on the machine before creating an account. The account only gets created at checkout, because a live sponsorship needs one to attach to.
Nothing goes live the same day it's bought. Payment is taken immediately and the machine goes live the next day, once it's actually been set up for your run.
Try before you buy
The quickest way to see what your name would be sitting next to is to play a machine for free. It takes about a minute, and it's the same view a sponsored player gets, just without your logo on it yet.
If you'd rather book a machine for a single event instead of a running placement, that's hiring one, not sponsoring one: different product, same hardware.
