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:

Are you see­ing high­er engage­ment on your YouTube videos?