Now available as a report, her presentation dives into emerging patterns in video duration, upload frequency, and unexpected brand collaborations. Let’s dive into these under-the-radar trends.

Length Matters: Cracking the Code to Video Duration

When thinking about the best video duration, it’s important to consider what type of device your audience is using to view that content.

• Mobile devices pulled 69% of total YouTube views in 2025 YTD.
• TV and desktop lagged behind with 16% and 6% of views, respectively. 
• Flipping from views to watch time, Mobile and TV each account for about 40% of total minutes watched.

Bottom line: people consume content differently depending on their device.

On connected TVs, viewers are more likely to settle in and watch long-form videos that are well beyond the 20-minute mark. The devices audiences use to watch content determine what they’re interested in viewing. 

The Key to Collaboration: Teaming Up with the Unexpected

Unexpected brand collaborations are proving to be one of the most effective ways for brands to break through and reach new audiences on social media. In particular, US Beauty brands are seeing strong performance – but in different categories than in years past. 

• Food & Drink was the 5th most sponsored category by US Beauty brands making up only 2.7% of uploads.
• But, Food & Drink content sponsored by US Beauty brands earned the highest engagement, 1.6X, compared to all other TikTok categories.

Real-world example of an unexpected collaboration: Beauty and skincare brand, Nivea, achieved 3X more engagements in the first seven days by leaning into a partnership with Food & Drink Tiktoker, @Onezwambola.

Post Like a Pro: How Often Is Too Often?

For the top US Gaming creators, optimizing YouTube upload frequency means striking the right balance between quality and quantity – especially when weighing human-created content against AI-assisted output.

• Hopper earns the most overall views by uploading 9.5 videos per day with the help of AI.
• Cadres uploads 2.5 videos per day and earns higher views per video with human-generated content. 
• If Hopper earned the same views per video as Cadres, his total views would jump from 2.6 billion to 9.6 billion. 

Hopper leads in overall views thanks to AI, but his individual videos garner the lowest views compared to the four competing Gaming creators. If he earned the same views per video as Cadres, his total views would jump from 2.6 billion to 9.6 billion.

So what does this mean for creators? If your content is human-generated, you can get away with posting fewer videos because audiences prefer this content. If you’re taking the AI route, those videos won’t earn as many views, so you have to post far more frequently.

In H1 2025, the top US Gaming creators by overall views and views per video averaged 4 uploads per day to YouTube.

The Bottom Line for Brands & Creators?

Keeping pace with emerging social video trends means building strategies rooted in real audience behavior across devices, formats, and content types.

Here’s how to turn these insights into actions:

• Optimize video duration by platform and audience preference – Tailor your content length to match how and where audiences watch.
• Break the mold with unexpected brand collaborations – Partnering with creators in adjacent or surprising categories can drive reach while building audience affinity.
• Refine your upload frequency – Analyze what’s working for your competitors and find the right balance between consistent output and meaningful engagement.

Want the inside scoop on the rest of the hidden trends taking shape in social video? Download the full report here.

The post Hidden Trends, Big Moves: What Audience Data Reveals About the Next Wave of the Creator Economy appeared first on Tubular Labs.

Each week, YouTube offers one lens on that question: a ranking of the top podcasts in the U.S., based on total watch time. For publishers, it’s an effective snapshot of viewers’ attention. But when trying to understand audience loyalty, repeat viewing behavior, or brand value for potential sponsors, it may just be the start of the conversation.

So how do we dig in even deeper?

At Tubular, we looked at three of the top podcast creators to find different lenses for success – and how publishers and brand partners can think about success in new ways.

Capitalizing on Core Fans: Kill Tony

Kill Tony, the live comedy podcast hosted by Tony Hinchcliffe, has built a strong following through frequent uploads and an always-changing stage format.

While it’s regularly a top podcast by watch-time, according to YouTube’s rankings, Tubular Audience Ratings also reveal the show drew in nearly 2.7 million unique U.S. viewers in June. High watch-time and lower unique viewers (relative to other top podcasts) indicate that Kill Tony has a strong base of frequent and repeat viewers, even if it’s not as broad of an audience.

Kill Tony has been able to double down on sustained engagement and audience retention, and that sort of dedication can translate well with brand partners looking to find niche but highly bought-in viewership. This year alone, the show has been able to translate their dedicated viewership into sponsorships from brands like Shopify, ZipRecruiter, Tecovas, BlueChew, and more.

By prioritizing a show like Kill Tony that has such dedicated tune-in, these sponsors are banking on higher conversion rates from extended periods of engagement – even with a “smaller” audience.

Underrated Engagement: Brian Tyler Cohen

Brian Tyler Cohen’s political podcast has surged during a very busy year for news. While uploads are not overly long (videos are typically under 20 minutes), minutes watched and unique viewers are still climbing. Tubular data shows his unique U.S. viewers grew by 29% month-over-month in June, making him one of the top five podcasts by reach.

Political content typically isn’t as popular during non-election years, but Cohen’s been able to use the daily news cycle as a lightning rod for not just engagement and repeat viewing, but also growing his audience. The subject matter may not make the show the easiest sell to sponsors, but high reach in a crowded space can still make for lucrative monetization opportunities through YouTube’s own ad programs.

For creators like Cohen, understanding audience growth from a unique viewer and minutes watched standpoint helps tailor content strategies. The underlying data allows creators to lean into videos that continue increasing trajectories and meet viewers with the topics they’re most interested in watching, in their preferred formats.

Audiences Want Weird: The Why Files

The Why Files’ evergreen podcast invites audiences into the world of myths, legends, conspiracies, and weird happenings, in a way that inspires both repeat and archival viewing. And with a narrative approach resembling television, there’s little reason for viewers to drop out before each episode wraps up after 20 to 25 minutes.

Tubular data shows that The Why Files grew unique U.S. viewers by 21% month-over-month in June, while watch-time climbed by 24%. Having those figures grow similarly shows that The Why Files was not just acquiring new viewers, but also getting them to tune into full episodes right away, too.

Despite the allure of timely podcast episodes (and there’s plenty of reason to embrace the format), evergreen content can lend to more library viewing and enhance the power of extended tune-in and discovery, especially on TV devices.

The Full Picture: Adding Context to Weekly Rankings

YouTube’s rankings are an excellent signal of what podcasts are trending week-to-week, and those rankings can be supplemented with additional data to help evaluate long-term value, emerging trends, or audience dynamics.

Tubular gives you the tools to gain deeper insights on:

• Audience depth: Along with how much time people are spending on content, understand more about who the audience is, how often they watch, and how their engagement evolves over time.
• Cross-platform context: Tubular customers get a more comprehensive picture of their audience, understanding performance across social video platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and more.
• Growth potential: Brands and publishers utilizing Tubular can identify creators on the rise or undervalued shows that perform well both in terms of audience loyalty and tune-in frequency.

If you’re allocating budget, scouting partners, or refining your content strategy, these data points can better inform your approach to content.

Curious what else Tubular data reveals? Get a demo today.

The post Beyond the Views: Expanding Podcast Rankings appeared first on Tubular Labs.

Using these clips, we decided to see if there were any valuable insights and trends that came out of this year’s video-based election coverage.

Here’s what we found…

Late Night Hosts Front and Center in Presidential Debates Coverage

One of the most interesting trends in this 2020 election is that news media isn’t the only type of creator generating the most views on social video. In fact, viewers seem to love watching videos from late night hosts and their comedic commentaries on the candidates.

When we look at the top 10 presidential debate videos of the last 90 days with the most 7-day average views (V7) on YouTube, we see four of them hailing from late night hosts.

Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon all landed on the chart for videos about the presidential debates in particular.

The popularity of these videos from late night hosts only makes sense considering viewers often want a lighter take on a more serious subject.

And the high 7-day view counts imply that these comedians really hit the mark in terms of their analyses, appealing to millions of people around the U.S. (and even around the world). 

Debate Viewership Lower Overall This Year Compared to 2016

After looking at presidential debates content on Facebook, we uncovered another fascinating trend. On that platform, viewership dipped this year compared to the numbers from 2016’s debate content.

For example, in September 2016, the peak viewership on debate content reached a high of roughly 150M views, with subsequent debates receiving lower overall views (around 100M each).

However, in 2020, audiences seemed less keen to watch debate content on Facebook. The peak viewership on that video content this year was about 125M total views, with two following debates generating less than 50M views each.

Any number of reasons could contribute to why viewers watched less presidential debate content on Facebook than they did in 2016.

The important thing to remember, especially for media publishers and news outlets, is to make sure you distribute your content across multiple platforms if you want to reach the highest amount of viewers possible.

Want more insights like this?

The post What Can We Learn from This Year’s Presidential Debates Videos? appeared first on Tubular Labs.

Fortunately, that’s changed thanks to Tubular Audience Ratings. 

This new set of TV-style metrics helps you understand your audience’s time spent viewing and de-duplicated engagement across YouTube and Facebook. 

These cross-platform, standardized metrics finally allow you to compare digital video apples-to-apples with traditional media. For example, amongst other metrics, you can now understand:

• Total watch time
• Unique viewers
• Average watch time per unique viewer
• 30-second views
• De-duplicated reach
• Audience demographics

These will give you a more comprehensive, global picture of your true audience reach and engagement for social video. 

Check out the examples below of some of these powerful new ratings.

Comparing Late Night Hosts’ Unique Social Reach to TV

Out of all the late night shows and hosts, Nielsen claims The Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert earned the most viewership on linear TV with an average of 3.6M viewers across its 2019-2020 season. But did Colbert win on social video, too?

As it turns out, Jimmy Fallon (Nielsen’s 2nd-place winner for live TV viewership at an average of 2M viewers) was actually #1 for unique U.S. viewers across both YouTube and Facebook!

Across selected late night hosts, Jimmy Fallon’s YouTube and Facebook reach hit a total of 19.2M unique viewers in August 2020 alone, nearly 2M more than runner-up Trevor Noah. Colbert’s social reach was fourth at 11.5M uniques, roughly 4.5M behind third place winner James Corden.

Takeaway: Your show may be winning in traditional entertainment media, but as social video catches up, you can see where your audiences are truly spending their time. Adjust your digital strategy to capture more of this attention.

Comparing De-Duplicated Audiences by Platform

Speaking of late night hosts, let’s break down James Corden’s audiences by platform. While Tubular Audience Ratings gives you a larger picture of your audience across both YouTube and Facebook, they are not one and the same.

For example, in August 2020, Corden boasted 26.3M uniques on YouTube and 13.7M uniques on Facebook. Across these uniques, there was a small overlap of 1.8M viewers.

Deduplicating Corden’s audiences shows his cross-platform unique reach is potentially smaller than expected, and that he has a much larger audience on YouTube. 

Takeaway: When you know your true de-duplicated unique reach across platforms, you can know how to program separately for each. You can also grow your cross-platform reach bigger than your competitors’ and win larger pitches based on your unique reach.

Comparing Cross-Platform Unique Reach Through Audience Ratings

Another benefit to de-duplicating audiences across YouTube and Facebook is you’re able to see how your total cross-platform unique reach compares to your subscribers and likes.

Let’s look at Got Talent Global as an example. As of August, the TV entertainment show had 14.8M YouTube subscribers and 10.9M Facebook page likes. Now compare that to Got Talent Global’s whopping 72M cross-platform unique viewers, which is 3x higher than its subscribers and likes combined!

Clearly, subscribers and likes don’t provide a full picture of how audiences interact with digital video content. Your properties could actually be much larger (and much more valuable to advertisers) than you thought.

Takeaway: Use your cross-platform unique reach to prove your actual, larger value and impact to advertisers and win more deals. 

Comparing Audience Demographics

Broadcast entertainment companies generate billions of views on their social video content per year. But what if you could say your TV show was in the top five for a specific demographic across YouTube and Facebook?

For example, Comedy Central was #1 for unique cross-platform U.S. male viewers aged 18-34 in August 2020 across American TV broadcasters. As for female audiences, they preferred spending their time with Ellen DeGeneres, which was #1 for unique cross-platform U.S. female millennials in August.

Audience differentiators play a big role in showing you a new, more accurate picture of which of your properties and TV shows are actually the most popular across different demographics.

Takeaway: Knowing this type of audience information, you can move forward with selling media against your #1 content, as well as developing new shows with similar formats and content that would appeal to your top demographics. 

Comparing TV Shows by Minutes Watched

Finally, let’s look at the value of minutes watched. With Tubular Audience Ratings, you can measure content by total minutes watched or by unique 30-second views, but for this example, we’ll stick with the former.

We pitted two well-loved reality TV shows against each other: Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. In August 2020 alone, Kardashians saw 38.9M cross-platform minutes watched, while Housewives earned just 0.7M cross-platform minutes.

While publications often pick Kardashians and Housewives as some of the top reality shows of all time, the real winner — on social, at least — is the Kardashian family. They’re simply unmatched based on minutes watched.

Takeaway: Unlock bigger budgets and advertising potential by knowing the true social engagement and reach of your properties based on minutes watched, not just on subscribers, likes, or even views. 

Curious to see what else Tubular Audience Ratings can do for you?

The post Compare Social Video Directly to TV with Tubular Audience Ratings ™ appeared first on Tubular Labs.

How can you provide fast, reliable, and data-driven answers to internal stakeholders when they have questions about your company’s video performance?

This is where solid reporting comes in. Being able to quickly and easily report on the performance and direction of video content is vital to your company’s operations and success. 

Below, we’ve outlined how analysts can create these types of quick, impactful reports that inform content strategy and provide a leg up on the competition.

Here’s how to get started: 

Report on the Macro Environment

Start each report by looking at the competitive landscape as a whole. Which creators/channels in your industry are seeing growth (yours and/or competitors’)? What genres are growing and across which platforms? 

Answering these questions first helps you understand the wider landscape and benchmark yourself against it. This data will also help determine not only which trends are on the rise, but also if your company is outpacing these and staying ahead of the game with your video content. 

Example: Let’s say you’re a media company choosing to report on the latest trends in entertainment, news & politics, and kids’ content on YouTube and Facebook with a focus on the performance of media companies, influencers, and brands. 

Look at the monthly and yearly growth across these genres, platforms, and creator types to determine short and long-term trends and where you land within them.

Analyze Your Own Video Content Performance

Next, look to how your overall properties or channels are stacking up against those of your competition (start with maybe 5-10 main competitors). Where do you stand in the market and what’s changed?

Also report on your channels’ content performance across platforms in your favored genres that you benchmark via competitors’ overall rankings. Additionally, include your video performance across categories by comparing one property/channel to the average category performance.

Example: If you were ViacomCBS wanting to analyze July’s performance of the News & Politics genre YouTube, look to your videos’ with high average 7-day views (V7) to determine which top categories drove views and engagement in July. 

You would then look at competitors’ video content in these categories, as well, so you can get your industry benchmark for that month (maybe you had high performance in “National Security” or “US Presidency,” for example, but lower-than-benchmark performance in “Law” and “US Government”).

Bring It to Life and Iterate

Finally, repeat this process frequently and make improvements as often as necessary. It’s best to set up your reports and update monthly so you know your latest performance and impact. 

You can also make sure to ask stakeholders what other information they need in future reports, and give others in your organization the ability to self-serve and answer internal questions more quickly and accurately to speed up the reporting process. 

Overall, these steps will help you improve your company’s video content performance, content strategy, and budgeting and investment decisions.

Example: Include and always update macro and genre trends; competitive performance by property, genre, platform, and channels; and content performance within video categories.

Ready to make your own reporting more quick and painless?

The post How to Create Quick, Easy, and Impactful Video Content Reports appeared first on Tubular Labs.

Knowing your owned reach is no longer enough to make informed decisions about your budget and promotional efforts. You need to truly understand your full share of voice (SOV) on social video, and then you can expand that share by working with better influencers to meet your goals.

Below are three steps for helping you start to measure and increase your SOV by working with influencers who are not only right for your brand, but who are also going to help you differentiate your brand from competitors!

Measure and Compare Your Total Owned + Earned Views

While you may already know how many views your own channels get, it’s important to get insights about views and engagements from media companies, influencers, and other brands talking about your brand. 

This information means you’ll know more about your true reach, which you can then use to justify your social video efforts internally, and also to compare to your competitors’ owned + earned content.

Example: Using the solutions available to you, gather information on your content as well as competitors’ to get an idea of your total SOV in your industry.

Also, vet the top 60-100 videos you discover to make sure they’re all relevant to your brand/company. Keep building out your list of videos or searches if you need to.

Find Better Influencers to Work With

Anyone can find influencers to partner with as a way to expand SOV. But in reality, your brand needs to find better influencers to work with that are relevant, credible, and cost-effective.

Influencer partnerships need to be the best fit for your brand that they can be. You can accomplish this by looking for influencers who are already talking about you, who drive large views within your category/genre, who audiences already have a high affinity for, and who are lesser-known but are on a growth trajectory.

Example: Create a list of potential influencers to work with based on the parameters above. For example, find the top five influencers who talked about your brand in the last year, or the most active influencers in your category in the last 30 days.

You can also search for growth influencers who have good reach (minimum of ~500K subscribers) and who show continual growth trajectory in terms of views or subscribers (maybe around 1 million views per month and counting).

Implement and Iterate Your Influencer Marketing Process

Finally, make sure you’re set up for success for future influencer partnerships to ensure your total SOV increases. Set up a process or framework that will help you make more informed decisions on who to partner with and how they can help your brand grow across social video.

As you run activations with influencers, use your findings to experiment with different formats, negotiate rates, etc. Build your own scorecard for how you evaluate influencer marketing success based on your previous activations, and iterate when needed.

Example: Make sure every influencer campaign you run includes tracking and attribution mechanisms so you can measure performance.

Also, because the influencer landscape changes quickly, with new creators showing up and others under-performing, conduct a monthly analysis on your campaigns and see what’s working and what’s not. 

Curious about your total SOV on social video and how you can improve it?

The post How to Increase Your Share of Voice with Influencers appeared first on Tubular Labs.

When thousands of videos are uploaded across social video platforms every millisecond, how do you cut through the noise? And how are you supposed to grow your audience without killer content?

Ian Edgar knows how to do both. As the VP of Creative Strategy and Video Programming at Condé Nast Entertainment, Edgar is in the content strategy trenches every day, working hard to make the media giant’s videos some of the most-watched and unforgettable in the world.

His efforts have helped Condé Nast’s YouTube channels — which include well-known properties like Wired, Vogue, and GQ — grow to 39M+ subscribers and earn 11B views each month.

Tubular hosted a webinar with Edgar to find out why Condé Nast’s content strategy is so effective and how you can apply the company’s best practices to your own.

Letting the Creative Process Guide You

One of Conde Nast’s core content strategies is actually quite foundational. Instead of focusing on algorithms, Edgar says the media giant’s goal is to scale via the creative process.

“The approach we take is to create new frequencies and jagged elements, looking to get the scale not through gaming the system or tweaking some set of algorithmic best practices, but really through believing in the creative,” the VP noted in a recent webinar with Tubular.

In simpler terms, Edgar aims to make successful content good and make good content successful. He and his team work to make original videos that are not only shareable, but also substantial and worthwhile. This trust in creative is what he believes has driven Condé Nast’s success.

But what does “success” mean in terms of strategy? Condé Nast has some theories about that, too.

Defining Success Based on Core Principles

Edgar says that while hit rate and other factors tie into what makes successful content for the legacy publisher-turned-digital-creator, unsuccessful videos also feed into creative development.

“It’s easy to see [which] videos have been successful, so we should make more, but how many of those types of videos were unsuccessful?” Edgar explained. “That’s a really important thing to understand when reading the data.”

Condé Nast also determines success by separating its content into a 3-tiered programming funnel, which includes:

• videos that will draw viewers in (the discovery level)
• videos that will make them stay (the decision level)
• videos that consistently deliver harder-hitting facts and reporting (the core level)

“Understanding where an idea is going to sit within these buckets is very important, and we see different benchmarks for success [across them],” Edgar noted. “You don’t have as high view expectations on your core content, but because you don’t have such high expectations, you have space to really build a voice.”

Focusing on the Four Tenets of Content Strategy

Edgar and his team have been able to build Condé Nast’s voice so powerfully over the last few years across all its digital properties because four basic tenets drive its video content strategy.

For starters, Edgar and his team make sure every video has clarity. Not only do the visual elements need to look cohesive (i.e. a clear thumbnail with no extra elements), but the message of the clip needs to be understood.

Next up is structure, which Edgar notes is key for retention. “If people don’t understand what’s about to happen, then they’re more likely to drop off,” he explained.

Insights are the inherent value and takeaways each video should give to viewers. Instead of making box-ticking content, publishers should be “seeking to deliver unexpected, delightful, and edifying value.”

The final tenet is elevations, where Edgar and his team want to make videos that stand out (which goes back to the company’s “new frequencies” approach). “When you’ve got so much content to choose from, it’s just a wall of noise,” he said. “Making a new frequency sings out like tapping a glass in a crowded room.”

Overall, Edgar believes the first two tenets convey simplicity that draws viewers in. The second two tenets of complexity make them stay, like, share, and subscribe, the actions every digital publisher craves from their audience.

Using Data to Discover Audience Desires

This day and age, everyone has access to data. But Edgar says analysis and synthesis of data are vital components of the video content strategy process which ultimately helps you better understand what your audience wants.

“Reading between the lines in the data, and then creating stories around that, can then tee up creatives to make great decisions that lead them to success,” he explained.

Using data in the right way helps Condé Nast find patterns and key insights into audience preferences. For example, Edgar notes his team will look at similarities, commonalities, or recurring themes between the tone and theme of successful videos across its different channels.

If many clips could be described as “tip-packed” or “exuberant” or even “confident,” for example, Edgar says you can start to understand these “clusters of concepts” the more you look at the data.

“That’s the real pattern recognition. You can do that at the level of a topic, or at the level of ‘why do humans like stuff,” Edgar explained. “That’s what makes this endlessly exciting.”

Aiming for Repeatable Success

Condé Nast’s approach to video creation is clearly a winning formula. Content strategists, if you’re struggling to understand your audiences and develop content they can’t help but watch, you should take Edgar’s teachings to heart.

After all, across all its verticals, Condé Nast is seeing massive growth and is constantly landing on the Tubular leaderboards. “(Wired doesn’t) happen to be the #1 science and tech channel; it’s really a function of us applying these concepts,” Edgar said. “What we’re learning about attention is fundamental,”

Ready to see other ways you can emulate Condé Nast’s success through data?

The post This Is Condé Nast’s Successful Video Strategy appeared first on Tubular Labs.

Originally founded as a TV network in 2004, First Media launched a digital-first strategy in 2016 when it realized that Facebook was growing and women were demanding more content related to their lifestyles. Since then, the media giant has grown from less than 100K followers to more than 110M followers and 1.5B monthly views across its social accounts.

Get More First Media Insights Here

Of course, we needed to know the “secret sauce” behind First Media’s success. In this interview with the company’s CEO Guy Oranim and CPO Yuval Rechter, we uncovered not only actionable tips and strategy, but sound advice on the value of metrics like average 30-day views (V30).

Here’s what they had to say:

Tubular Insights: How do you identify as a brand and a player in the media landscape? What makes First Media so recognizable?

Guy Oranim: We’ve focused heavily on the key verticals we believed we can deliver the most value to our audiences with: DIY, lifestyle, food, and beauty. We also have a partnership with Zumba for in-person classes, along with our TV distribution.

Through all of these, we have a very diversified relationship with the women that we serve. The common thread is that we’re trying to inspire them to lead better, more effective and efficient lives.

TI: How do you gain a competitive advantage in such a crowded space? Do you have creative, data-driven approaches to how you’re operating?

GO: Since our inception on social media, our grand strategy is always quality over quantity. Instead of filling the space with a lot of videos we create very fast and very casually, we create a low number of videos and invest heavily into the resources to make those the best they can be.

Yuval Rechter: We post the least amount of videos relative to other publishers, and that’s intentional. We have several people from different teams working on each video; we have the data team working very closely with creative teams to inform them of actionable insights and learning for the next video, and the next video, and so on.

We also invest time into every single video so that when it goes live, we get the maximum amount of reach for us and for our advertising partners. This is why we have the highest V30 in the past 16 months, and are #1 in the world for views per post for Blossom content.

Additionally, we created a proprietary tool called Commentary Analysis Tool (CAT). This helps us find every comment and pull insights from our audiences, which informs our creative and the brands that work with us. For example, brands want to know if there’s positive sentiment about their product, or if someone is wondering if they can shop for it in the nearest store — we’re able to get those insights.

TI: How do you use data to inform your video strategy? What are your favorite metrics, and do you implement A/B testing?

YR: Data is a core of what we do, starting from the learnings from Tubular and passing that on to creative. We have an internal algorithm for each format and genre that shows us what’s important to make them successful.

What works for Blossom, for example, is very different from what works for Blusher, which focuses on beauty. This allows us to get super viral, one video after another.

GO: We rely heavily on V30, because of our conversations with brands. They tell us it’s not enough to have views; they want quality experiences correlated with quality content. They also want maximum ROI on their investments.

We think V30 best represents those two asks. This metric provides an objective way to prove quality. If you’re able to make people watch your content consistently over 30 days, that’s the best evidence of your quality.

Also, if brands can see relevant, long-term views on content, they’re happy with their investment. First Media has done this consistently; if you look at the top 20 or so branded videos from last year, about seven of them were made by us.

YR: We want to get maximum views per video, because that’s how we deliver results. V30 is a unique index that we believe should be the #1 indicator if a publisher is good or not.

GO: It’s so important to us, we won’t take projects we think will hurt our V30 numbers!

TI: How do you optimize for V30? How is V30 informing your creative development or programming strategy?

YR: The first thing we do is make amazing videos. We work on a data-driven approach that then informs the creative team; data and creative should always work together and speak the same language.

Also, our branded and editorial teams are one and the same. We all work together, and all insights and all learning are done across one team which trickles down to have a high-quality video that is high-performing over and over again.

It’s critical for us to work well on every video because there’s a reputation to our brand. There’s expectations from our fans, and we call them “fans” because they are people, not “users.” We want to make sure every video is positive, helpful, innovative, and inspiring.

GO: One thing that sets us apart from other publishers is being very good at optimization. It’s key to our success; we came late to the game in 2016 but were able to break through because of it.

We also invest a lot into training. Sometimes it can take months for a new producer to recreate the success of our videos, even if they’re very talented.

TI: How is V30 used in a sales pitch — what resonates with your buyers?

GO: The starting point is comparing our V30 to competitive sets in each vertical that we have and showing this to brands we’re pitching. For example, as of May 2019, So Yummy has a V30 of 13.5M views vs. Tastemade with 180K; with Blossom, we’re talking 18.4M V30 per video vs. Nifty which is 257K.

We also look at Tubular when it comes to the performance of our branded videos. Last year, three of the videos we did with Walmart were in the top 20 best-performing sponsored clips, but none of the videos they did with other publishers were.

With this data, we don’t have to compliment ourselves; we can just show the data. We can prove that our videos are performing the best relative to our direct competition.

TI: Is there a particular video series or campaign you’re particularly proud of?

GO: 2017 and 2018 gave a lot of videos to be proud of, particularly in the branded realm. In addition to the huge challenge to create virality, we had to combine the commercial messages of the brand with the need to stay authentic and give value to the viewers to get people to share.

We are experts in creating branded videos people will share. People watch and share our content even though they know it’s branded; you have to be completely transparent and give [your audience] a lot of content to create a value perception and get them to watch all the way to the end.

The campaign we really liked from this year was for Dunkin’ Donuts. We took a cup of coffee and showed different DIY hacks you can use it on things that have nothing to do with coffee. This got the attention of viewers and was the most successful branded video for the DIY category in the month of March.

This Dunkin’ Donuts-branded video delivered a CPM 76% lower than initially proposed. This was 7X guaranteed video views-further aligning our audiences. And it had strong positive sentiment — 99% of reactions were positive.

TI: What elements of storytelling do you rely on in all your branded videos?

GO: We always ask how to get extra value to viewers. Today, you have so many different food publishers and videos, that just having another cool-looking video doesn’t cut it. We know a great video is a starting point, but what would give extra value here?

You can get that extra value from multiple places. You can create an amazing design or the way you place the food, you can make it healthy even though it doesn’t look like it should be, or you can show the ease of use and time saved.

If you take any of those elements, and add them on top of a great-looking video, you can make it viral whether it’s editorial or branded.

TI: What are your biggest learnings from 2019 so far? Any unique challenges that didn’t exist a few years ago?

YR: Facebook announced they’re changing their algorithm again, and we welcome this. They’re focusing on original content and they’re focusing on loyalty (recurring viewers). You’re going to see big changes over the next few months on pages that repurpose, reupload, or take content that isn’t theirs or licensed.

This move is Facebook — and Instagram — rewarding its original creators, and this will get us more reach, more views, and more revenue since our content is 100% original.

Loyalty will also be key. When our fans see content from one of our properties, they trust us to always deliver them amazing content. They’re coming back again and again, and we have the stats to prove that.

The post Why V30 Rules All: An Interview with First Media appeared first on Tubular Labs.

And they are, uploading about 18 years of video every day. With such a competitive content marketplace, how can content strategists ensure they’re capturing the attention of their audience?

Here we present a simple answer and call to action: stop attempting to replicate virality and instead use insights into audience consumption habits to inform your content strategy.

By doing so, you’ll be able to turn any content operation into a well-oiled machine that regularly creates high-performing videos at scale that audiences can’t help but love.

In our white paper, “Audience Insights: Creating Video from Data, Not Guesswork,” we outline how those making digital content decisions can use insights about their viewers to guide their video production process.

You will learn how to:

• Uncover which videos perform, and why, in order to reach beyond typical social analytics
• Determine the variables that define your audience and what (else) they watch
• Benchmark your content against competitors’ using cross-comparison metrics called Tubular Video Ratings (TVR)

The post Creating Better Content Strategies for Video with Audience Insights appeared first on Tubular Labs.

Any digital-first publisher or brand knows how vital data-driven insights are to their programming and audience development strategies. Long gone are the days when a video creator could spot an obvious opportunity in the market and create quick and easy content that would fill that gap and give the social video audience what they wanted.

But times have changed. The video content strategist faces intense competition to create engaging content in a huge range of genres and verticals, and across a multitude of social video platforms. Savvy publishers and hungry brands are fighting for the same share of voice in a bid to win over eyeballs, minds, and dollars. And those creators all face the same issues: how to easily identify the types of videos that succeed, and how to find growth opportunities within digital video.

For video strategists and programming directors tasked with creating content and growing their audience, Tubular Labs has long been the leading video data platform that creates confidence in the daily video decisions you make. We’re excited to introduce Performance Insights, a new reporting functionality that is designed specifically to simplify and enhance your video content analysis workflow.

Related reading – Audience Insights: Creating Intelligent Content Strategies With Metrics of What Your Audience Wants

Performance Insights: Benchmarking the Video Ecosystem

The video ecosystem is changing fast. Content strategists need to make quick decisions but there’s so much data from all over, how do you generate those insights and turn them into rock-solid content decisions? Performance Insights! Performance Insights draws on the power of Tubular’s comprehensive platform of videos across platforms and devices. With access to 5B videos, 400M views, and 13M creators, we can provide content strategists with visualized insights for confidence in your strategic video decisions.

Beauty Video Content: Stellar Insights in Less than 20 Seconds!

Let’s take a look at the metrics around video duration and beauty video uploads to YouTube in the past 30 days. Using the dropdowns, you can toggle between many content characteristics such as creator type, video duration, top properties and many more in order to compare various performance metrics along those dimensions. We wanted to focus on optimum duration, so selected that particular metric.

Performance Insights allows you to quickly (the above example was generated in less than 20 seconds) to sort the results by various success metrics, giving you a wealth of instant information. If we sort Top Beauty Creators on YouTube, defined by engagements, we can confirm that Protex Brasil has the highest average views in the first 30 days (V30) after uploading content to the platform.

This kind of data driven insight can help you find partners with the right fit for your company, or showcase your own success in various dimensions. Using Performance Insights, programming directors creating content around beauty can find the hottest influencers to work with in a matter of seconds! And what’s more, you can instantaneously sort the results by different success metrics with one click.

“With Performance Insights, I am prepared to quickly respond when asked for the optimal video length for our videos. Insights such as video duration performance guide editorial decision-making and saves my team time.”

Stephen Reader, Senior Manager of Analytics and Insights at Viacom.

Performance Insights: Competitor Research & More

No publisher, brand or influencer is creating social video in a vacuum in 2018. Tubular’s revolutionary software gives video content strategists the instant ability to cross-reference industry metrics and filter out the noise to find the nuggets that increase your decision making efficiency, and validate existing decisions in a few seconds. You’ll be able to dig deep and see how your content is performing in the ecosystem against some of the biggest players in the game.

At Tubular, we believe you should spend less time without direction in video and more time producing results with better content. With Tubular Intelligence, you can finally create with confidence. To learn more about Tubular’s Intelligence platform, check out the product features to see how it can help you. We look forward to serving the market’s leading video insights platform.

Take your video content strategy to the next level with our White Paper “Audience insights: how to create video from data, not guesswork”

The post Uncover Your Next Digital Video Strategy with Performance Insights appeared first on Tubular Labs.

Content Strategists are busy people, so we put together a tl;dr infographic with the most important takeaways from our Fortnite report. Read below!

The staggering success of Fortnite took the gaming world by surprise, but those with access to the success metrics that matter would have quickly spotted it becoming a power trend to watch.

Power trends have the ability to disrupt the online conversation and pull it in a new direction altogether. They also open up countless opportunities for content creation across different platforms, verticals, genres, and formats.

Fortnite has disrupted the narrative in so many ways, not least because it has served as a catalyst for a number of video trends that have broken down the boundaries across genres. It’s had its own “Harlem Shake” moment with the Fortnite Dance Challenge, pulling in creators and viewers outside the usual gaming fanbase, and opening up the possibilities for innovative content creation.

While we’re on the subject of Fortnite, let’s use this game as a guide to breaking out the signs of a power trend across social video!

Download our report on how Fortnite changed the YouTube game.

5 Signs of a Social Video Power Trend

Video content strategists and audience development executives are always on the lookout for insights and trends in social video around which they can create quality and engaging content. It can often be a challenge to know where that content sits if those teams don’t have access to the latest data. When something as big as Fortnite comes along, it can also be a challenge to identify the opportunities around video. The Fortnite phenomenon has changed the game for gaming brands, and to put this gaming trend into context, Fortnite-related content could qualify as its own genre, bigger than some mainstream verticals on YouTube! Brands, publishers, and influencers have all benefited from creative campaigns around the game — here are five ways how:

#1 Power Trends Often Start with Single-Genre Influencers

Fortnite launched in a blaze of glory in July 2017, but nobody could have genuinely predicted how the game would ripple through online video in the subsequent year. Of course, it’s a no-brainer that influencers would jump on the game (as they did in their hundreds of thousands, generating 49B views on YouTube between July 2017 and September 2018). Channels like FGTeeV, Ali-A, and Ninja embraced the multiplayer game with massive enthusiasm, creating walkthroughs and reviews for a quickly growing fan base. So far, so predictable. It’s what happened next that started to turn Fortnite into a trend worth watching.

#2 Influencers Outside the Genre Adopt the Trend to Reach New Audiences

Fortnite content soon began migrating outside of the usual gaming channels to catch the attention of more mainstream creators. Influencers like the Eh Bee Family started to upload content around the game, generating significant views and establishing Fortnite as one of the truly-defining pop-culture moments of 2018. The Fortnite phenomenon changed the game for video influencers, with a staggering 6% of YouTube influencers creating Fortnite-focused clips — of those videos, over 80% were from creators considered non-gamers.

#3 Influencers Create Multiple Videos Off the Same Trend

The next indicator of the power trend that is Fortnite is the way non-gaming channels – like The Eh Bee Family – created multiple pieces of content off the back of the game. That particular channel picked up on one aspect of the phenomenon: the Fortnite Dance Challenge. It took that to the mainstream in April 2018, generating 71.8M views for this particular video:

Following the success of “Fortnite Dance Challenge in Real Life,” the Eh Bee Family created another 6 videos around the challenge, generating a further 172M YouTube views for their challenge.

#4 Demand (Views, Engagements) Outpaces Supply (Videos & Creators)

The fact that 80% of Fortnite content has been created by non-gaming YouTube channels highlights the demand for Fortnite-focused videos far outstripping supply. Viewers are hungry for content, and the publishers who recognized this are reaping the rewards in terms of views and engagements. Around 50 billion total YouTube views of Fortnite content were created by less than 50 media publishers, blowing open the case for creating more clips around the game.

#5 Early-Adopter Publishers Successfully Bring the Trend Mainstream

Those publishers who jumped on the Fortnite Dance Challenge bandwagon and helped to push it mainstream include major digital and traditional publishers like BuzzFeed and the Cartoon Network. These early adopters generated 40M views and over 700K engagements on the back of a trend that may well have stayed hidden in gaming circles, but went viral as more mainstream channels recognized the appetite around this particular moment.

These five signs are a distinct way to identify an up-and-coming power trend in digital video. Fortnite may have been the key example from the last couple of years, but these signs can be found across any genre or industry — keep that in mind for 2019.

Want to learn more about Fortnite’s disruptive marketing tactics?

The post How to Spot Power Trends in Social Video: Key Takeaways from Fortnite appeared first on Tubular Labs.

Learn more about WAVE

How did WAVE grow its empire so quickly in just two years? By pinpointing competitive advantages in the digital video space through deep fan engagement. For WAVE, it’s no longer about the highlight reel — it’s about staying agile and keeping its content muscles flexed as audiences react to new niches, athletes, and personalities.

We had an interview with WAVE Founder and COO Ishaan Sutaria about the sports publisher’s thriving social video strategy. Check out his insights below!

Tubular: Let’s jump into an important question — is sports an underserved audience on social video?

Ishaan Sutaria: Sports fandom is increasing, and the value of sports franchises has risen year over year. However, incumbents in digital media are losing market share at a very rapid pace. They are not adapting to new content formats, new ways of consuming content that consumers want.

We here at WAVE grew up watching SportsCenter, and it shaped our philosophy. We remember having to wait forever for that single highlight we wanted to see, which doesn’t work for today’s audiences.

Our belief is that you need to give consumers what they want, where they want it. This is especially true in today’s sports world which is full of fans eager to consume digital content related to their favorite franchises and athletes as soon as they can get their hands on it.

T: How does this philosophy of giving consumers “what they want, where they want it” feed into your video strategy?

IS: We’ve always been in awe of the energy of sports fandoms, and want to capture that as we build communities and curate content for them.

We do this by being distributed across many of these fandoms and properties. When we go to market with a new series or piece of content, our goal is to target more fans and be more viral than any given fan page. If we made a piece about Kyrie’s Kicks, for example, that can live across multiple channels because it has a broader sports applicability, and it can also live on channels as granular as a Kyrie-specific one.

Our philosophy also means we want to see organic fandom. If we notice a sport is being shared more than another (maybe rugby, for example), it signals to us there’s a content white space we can dominate. We can then get into areas we’re not covering because we know how to quickly build viral channels from the ground up.

As part of our strategy, we also identify creators who have the right voice for each community so we can work with them. If they are effective, they’ll become the voice of the WAVE brand to our community. We currently have a network of 130 creators that are authorities for a given niche, and in turn, they become part of our distribution model.

T: How does WAVE measure video content success?

IS: While size and scale are important, we always check if audiences are highly engaged with our content. This is a measure of whether or not they care about what we’re putting out in front of them.

Shares are a very important currency and a marker of virality, while ratios (view/impression, view/followers, engagement/views, etc.) help us better understand what resonates with our audiences.

But predominantly for us, successful content also means that a given piece of content enters into the mainstream conversation of sports. It’s important to tell a narrative from the right angle for this to happen. We ask ourselves how we can package these moments that matter in the right way to capture audience attention most effectively.

T: How does data help drive your success?

IS: Simply put, it helps us determine what makes our content tick. We can suss out and optimize the variables that matter, such as cover images, captions, length, angles, etc. Data also shows us how to operate more effectively with how often we’re publishing, what type of content, and what channels we’re distributing on.

We used to do this all manually, but now with Tubular, we’re constantly scouring the software for competitive data and what our competitors are doing. We’ve grown a lot in every metric since starting with Tubular; it’s easy to get topline views, but now we truly know how engaging our content is.

We also started selling ad products in August 2018, and our win rate has been helped by Tubular. It helps us figure out who to target and what narrative to tell them.

T: What are you proud of from this past year?

IS: Our content! Generally, the approach we take is finding ways to create weekly episodic programming that’s repeatable and scalable.

Our Next Up series is a great example of this. It focuses on emerging high school athletes, the stars of tomorrow’s sports teams. Our data-driven approach helped us listen to our audience’s preferences and respond with this series.

This decision paid off. A single episode of Next Up has pulled in 1.5M views on Facebook, and helped bring awareness to up-and-coming athletes. The attention the series gives to the high school football vertical in particular is incredible; these students are potential Heisman candidates who don’t get as much love as basketball peers. If we can help foster these relationships early on, it can pay dividends in the future.

T: What was your biggest lesson or take away from 2018? If you could change one thing you did, what would that be?

IS: We probably should’ve expanded onto new platforms faster than we did. We were initially afraid to because it wasn’t the same as our Instagram model.

However, once we master social storytelling, we can map our audience really quickly by creating virality. WAVE as a property in April had more views on Facebook than anyone else except ESPN, despite one person managing Facebook on a day-to-day basis. Essentially, we can capture share of voice really quickly because we’re agile.

T: What do you see as some of your unique challenges for video in 2019?

IS: We need to avoid the commoditization of sports content in particular. We want to keep finding the unique perspectives and moments people usually don’t see, and shine the light on narratives that aren’t being told to drive our success.

Basically, the same couple of narratives and the same 10 pieces of content are shared every day within sports. We will have to differentiate ourselves from that.

T: If you could name one insight to learn from your audience (that you’re not already aware of), what would it be?

IS: There’s a perception that some content is low-brow or that virality is inherently bottom of the barrel, but the audience (particularly this next generation of social-first people) expect to see stories that relate to them.

The challenge here is how to adapt classical storytelling for pace and attention spans. If you put something quality out, you’ll see the returns. Our audience is voracious for content that pushes the bounds of what we see on social currently; they’re honest with us, and we try to do the same in return.

We can accomplish this by “stealth-policing” our content and enabling fast feedback loops. We could, for example, implement an Instagram poll and get 30k people to give feedback within an hour; this would provide us with statistically significant data to make decisions about what to continue pursuing. Using these types of processes, we can consistently iterate and refine what we’re putting out faster than anyone.

T: About 4-5 years ago, Barstool Media came into the sports scene, and now almost half of the most-viewed media publishers in this space are digital-first. Where is WAVE’s role in that, and where do you see the space going in the future?

IS: Many companies think it’s hard to map audiences at scale with new demographics. However, we feel it’s never been easier to map intention at scale than it is now.

By being thoughtful and catering to audiences where they are, you can build an audience that generates a billion views a month or reaches 150M people easier than ever before. And if you lean into changes in consumption habits, attention spans, etc. as opposed to remaining ingrained in traditional ways of distribution, there is an unlimited opportunity.

Also, you can run a newsroom effectively with a small team. You don’t need to spend a lot of money or have a massive staff; in fact, you won’t be able to sustain that system. Unless you’re thinking about operations and content strategy around things that are working currently, you can build a successful business! We are proving that companies can be successful in this area.

The post The Underdog Story Modernized: An Interview with WAVE Sports appeared first on Tubular Labs.