World’s Biggest Brands are Small Fry on YouTube

Small brands are beating the giants on the world’s largest online video stage, according to the first comprehensive study of brand engagement and success on YouTube. The Touchstorm Video Index: Top Brands Edition, released today, shows that publishers now require 43 million views to be a top-5,000 entity on YouTube, and that a brand should be converting 2,274 subscribers for every one million views just to keep up with the pack.

“With only 74 brands appearing in the YouTube top 5,000, it’s clear there’s a significant brand fail on one of the most important platforms today,” said Alison Provost, CEO of Touchstorm. “YouTube has provided a content testing ground where celebrities, users, brands, content producers, retailers, and YouTube stars all have the same tools available to attract audiences. And while brands can afford to buy views and advertise their content, they’ve made very little progress in the organic viewership ecosystem.”

The Touchstorm Video Index: Top Brands Edition is the latest report from Touchstorm, a premier video distribution and content development provider. By analyzing brand success by category, language and other criteria, Touchstorm can show brands how and where they’re falling behind the best on YouTube and offer new benchmarks for refining strategies and measuring success.

Touchstorm Video Index Findings

The first report was pulled on October 5 th, providing a snapshot of how big brands effectively stood at the end of third quarter, 2013. The full report is available upon request and here, and following is a snapshot of key findings.  

•     Great content alone doesn’t translate to fast growth. Many premier brands–Nike Football, GuitarWorld, EA Sports, Nokia, Lego, Coca-Cola and Christian Dior–have great content but are not converting subscribers as well as they could. This shortcoming prevents new content from achieving the velocity that determines discovery under YouTube’s algorithms.
•     Big brands need to study small brands. Blendtec is in the top 10 yet Coke and Pepsi are not, The Mormon Church ranks yet top global brands Apple and Microsoft do not, Ford Models ranks higher than Ford Motors, and Little Tykes overwhelms Toys ‘R Us.
•     Brands need to define the competition broadly. The other 4,926 publishers, which include musicians, teenagers with webcams, and professional content producers, have vastly out-performed brands in finding an audience for their content.
•     Brands can’t spend their way to the top. About one-third of the brands made the list by buying a significant amount of YouTube advertising, but the other two-thirds got there through organic growth.
•     International brands build audiences. Brand channels from Brazil, Latin America and Japan make the list, beating out tens of thousands of English-language brand channels.
•     There are two routes to the top. Some brands made the list on the backs of a viral video or two; others made it by publishing less spectacular content more regularly. (Analysis is derived from View Concentration scores outlined in the report.)