4 YouTube Brand Content Insights From The Top 100 Brands

The top brands use YouTube to build rela­tion­ships and engage con­sumers with adver­tis­ing, a strong con­tent strat­e­gy, and part­ner­ships.

Greg Jarboe By Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR. Join the discussion » 0 comments

YouTube recent­ly part­nered with Pix­a­bil­i­ty to ana­lyze view­er­ship and pub­lish­ing trends from the Top 100 Brands as defined by the Inter­brand 2014 Best Glob­al Brands rank­ing. Here are four insights into brand con­tent on YouTube that dig­i­tal mar­keters can glean from the report.


1. Trends Around Viewership Of Brand Content On YouTube

Accord­ing to the Pix­a­bil­i­ty research:

  • The Top 100 Brands have a total of a whop­ping 40 bil­lion views across con­tent on their chan­nels. Near­ly half of these views hap­pened with­in the last year, which shows tremen­dous growth.
  • [Tweet “The num­ber of month­ly views among the top 100 brands on YouTube is up 55% from last year http://www.momentology.com/7252-youtube-content-insights-top-100-brands/”]
  • The num­ber of videos among the top 100 brands with more than 1 mil­lion views grew 29 per­cent from 2014 to 2015.

For exam­ple, Coca-Cola is using YouTube as a plat­form on which to build rela­tion­ships and engage con­sumers with unique, rel­e­vant con­tent.

We love the oppor­tu­ni­ty YouTube gives Coca-Cola to inter­act, build rela­tion­ships and share sto­ries that are authen­tic and rel­e­vant to the brand,” said Chris Big­da, direc­tor of con­nec­tions plan­ning and invest­ments for Coca-Cola North Amer­i­ca. “We are see­ing con­tin­ued suc­cess on the plat­form, upload­ing high­er qual­i­ty con­tent and achiev­ing bet­ter results for it. We are real­ly proud to be part of the YouTube com­mu­ni­ty and excit­ed by the part­ner­ship.”

2. Brands As Content Creators – Publishing Trends

Accord­ing to the Top 100 Brands report:

  • The top 100 brands have uploaded 611,000 videos to YouTube to date.
  • The Top 100 brand chan­nels in aggre­gate post­ed a new video every 18.5 min­utes in 2015.
  • Col­lec­tive­ly, the top 100 Brands own and oper­ate 2,434 chan­nels on YouTube.
  • This means that each of these brands have an aver­age of 2.43 chan­nels.
  • 10 per­cent of brand videos uploaded in the last year to YouTube are over 10 min­utes long. This indi­cates that brands are invest­ing in cre­at­ing longer form, made-for-YouTube con­tent, ver­sus tra­di­tion­al 15- or 30-sec­ond spots.
  • [Tweet “Thurs­day’s the most pop­u­lar day of week for YouTube uploads, fol­lowed close­ly by Tues­day  http://www.momentology.com/7252-youtube-content-insights-top-100-brands/”] and Wednes­day. The top 100 brands are seed­ing con­tent in the mid­dle of the week to cap­i­tal­ize on search per­for­mance for high­er traf­fic week­ends.

For exam­ple, Way­fair is using YouTube to exper­i­ment with new con­tent and reach untapped demo­graph­ics.

YouTube has become an incred­i­bly valu­able mar­ket­ing tool for Way­fair by pro­vid­ing us with a plat­form to deliv­er new and authen­tic con­tent to our cus­tomers,” said Ben Young, media man­ag­er for Way­fair TV and Video. “It’s excit­ing to see that we’re also reach­ing new audi­ences for our port­fo­lio of brands.” He adds, “Despite our suc­cess to date, it feels like we’ve only just scratched the sur­face with the YouTube plat­form.”

3. Fanship Of Brand Content On YouTube

Accord­ing to the Pix­a­bil­i­ty research:

  • There are 90 mil­lion likes on videos from the top 100 brands, and 8.9 mil­lion dis­likes – which means there are 10X more likes than dis­likes.
  • There are 16 mil­lion com­ments on their videos.
  • There are 73 mil­lion total sub­scribers to top 100 brand chan­nels on YouTube.
  • Sub­scriber­ship is up 47 per­cent year-over year.

For exam­ple, brands like Toy­ota have expe­ri­enced this engage­ment growth first-hand.

The ben­e­fit of a diverse plat­form like YouTube is they have an unpar­al­leled abil­i­ty to reach a vari­ety of demo­graph­ics,” said Dionne Colvin-Love­ly, direc­tor of tra­di­tion­al and new media at Toy­ota Motor Sales, U.S.A. “That aligns very well with Toyota’s diverse con­sumer and prod­uct line­up. YouTube allows our brand’s mes­sage to break through in an impact­ful way, and it offers great met­rics to see if the con­tent is res­onat­ing with the intend­ed audi­ence.”

4. Brands Are Growing Their Media Investment In Video Ads

Accord­ing to the Top 100 Brands report:

  • The num­ber of adver­tis­ers who are run­ning video ads are up more than 40 per­cent year-over-year.
  • For the top 100 adver­tis­ers (as defined by the adver­tis­ers with high­est media spend on video ads), the aver­age spend per adver­tis­er is up over 60 per­cent year-over-year.

As brands have become more edu­cat­ed on the return on YouTube adver­tis­ing, we’ve seen invest­ment grow across indus­tries,” said Pix­a­bil­i­ty CTO Andreas Goel­di. “Indus­tries that have tra­di­tion­al­ly lagged on YouTube – for exam­ple lux­u­ry brands, finan­cial ser­vices, and food – have become much more active. We’re see­ing high growth rates – they’re catch­ing up.

Brands are real­iz­ing that YouTube moves the nee­dle, pos­i­tive­ly impact­ing brand per­cep­tion and brand lift,” he said. “Smart brands under­stand that a mix of three ele­ments – paid adver­tis­ing, an active brand chan­nel with a strong con­tent strat­e­gy, and cre­ator part­ner­ships – are need­ed for opti­mum suc­cess, espe­cial­ly when try­ing to reach a younger audi­ence.”

Here’s the info­graph­ic from Pix­a­bil­i­ty:

Top 100 Brands YouTube Infographic


Are you see­ing high­er engage­ment on your YouTube videos?

Greg Jarboe

Written by Greg Jarboe

President, SEO-PR

Greg Jarboe is President and co-founder of SEO-PR, an award-winning content marketing agency that was founded in 2003. He’s the author of YouTube and Video Marketing and also a contributor to The Art of SEO, Strategic Digital Marketing, Complete B2B Online Marketing, and Enchantment. He’s profiled in the book Online Marketing Heroes, a frequent speaker at industry conferences, and writes for Tubular Insights and The SEM Post. He’s an executive education instructor at the Rutgers Business School and the Video and Content Marketing faculty chair at Simplilearn.

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