Each year, Pixability turns its video advertising technology on the top 100 global brands (per Interbrand’s ranking) to understand how these brands are performing on YouTube. This year, our analysts paid close attention to late Q2 and early Q3 to analyze how brand safety concerns impacted these top brands’ YouTube behavior.
Here’s what we found:
Overall, the top 100 global brands released 3% fewer YouTube videos in Q2 2017 over Q2 2016. However, that didn’t stop audiences from turning to YouTube to consume video content — and brand-owned content was no exception — with average brand-owned views in April/May 2017 up by 29% over the average monthly viewership in 2016. By July/August 2017, average monthly viewership was up by 67% compared to the same time period in 2016.
Across the top 100 brands, technology brands own the most channels on YouTube, averaging 51 different channels per brand, and also published the most long-form content compared to any other brand category — with 11% of tech brand videos clocking in at 10+ minutes.


This year’s top 100 brands are also diversifying their video content strategies, publishing myriad content types in varying video lengths — and increasingly, top brands are adopting YouTube’s new Bumper ad format. (These short-form video ads are effective at boosting upper-funnel metrics like ad recall and awareness, especially when paired with a broader TrueView campaign.) This year, we found that 76% of top brands published ads that were 6 seconds or shorter on YouTube, with the food & beverage industry dominating other categories in Bumper ad publication.

The top 100 brands of 2016 amassed a total audience of 104M subscribers, but this year’s class of top 100 brands has garnered 145M subscribers, a dramatic 39% year-over-year increase. YouTube subscribership is a key indicator that a brand’s video marketing is resonating with viewers, with audiences opting to connect with a brand directly to receive updates from the brand’s YouTube channel.
Our full top 100 analysis digs deeper into the brand winners of 2017, the leading industry categories, and more.
Download the infographic now.
Stay tuned next week for our white paper discussing the top 100 brands’ video performance, and how the brand safety fallout actually played out on YouTube.