The “YouTube view” is the most well-known metric of success on the Internet.
And it’s worthless!
Or, it’s at least potentially very misleading, particularly for brands. In short, views don’t mean diddly-squat without context. They are a vanity metric that can mistakenly get us excited and feel there is some sort of accomplishment. It’s not. Views, of course, can be bought. But how many of us really understand how paid views are measured on YouTube?
Paid View Breakdown
Paid views account for the vast majority of total views credited to a given beauty brand YouTube channel. Most of these are “pre-rolls,” also called “in-stream” ads, that appear as ads that are skippable after five seconds — which we, as consumers, ALWAYS skip. And of course there’s also the devil of all devils, the 15- or 30-second “forced,” unskippable pre-roll. The forced views are an option often taken up by brands that realize that no one wants to watch the first five-seconds of their ad, so they pay extra to make us watch it all the way through. But if we didn’t have time for five seconds, we definitely don’t have time for 30 seconds. In fact, it makes us all a little angry to be forced into watching these ads, right?
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Frankly it’s quite easy to assume that because YouTube sort of looks like TV, it’s the same thing, only smaller. So we use the exact same approach and shoehorn TV commercials into a place where they’re really not a fit. But YouTube isn’t a one-to-one broadcast medium like television. People don’t want to be talked at they want to have a conversation. So engagement is much more important than views. Of course, there are a number of pre-rolls that do work, but we often don’t know why or how, because we’re only judging them based on views.
How Paid Views Are Measured
Skippable pre-rolls are charged in a very fair way by Google/YouTube. There are two basic methods: If a video is longer than 30 seconds, brands only get charged if the viewer watches 30 seconds. If it’s less than 30 seconds long, brands only get charged if the pre-roll gets watched to the end. However, in both cases, brands get a lot of “views” for free, because even if someone clicks the five-second skip button, the video rolls up another view on the odometer, even if no one has really watched anything. This creates the perception that a lot of videos are being watched, when they aren’t.
Take a look at this graph:
You can see in green that “TrueView in-stream,” aka pre-roll, has almost zero viewership after five seconds, and yet they all count for views. And while the organic and in-display views here look more promising, they usually account for less than 1% of views on ads. So as a result, most brands who are shoehorning commercials into YouTube pre-rolls are getting almost zero true viewership or engagement.
Do we have your attention yet? If you don’t believe us about audience retention, check out the video by Amy Schmittauer on this post as she breaks down audience retention.
What is engagement, exactly?
Just counting YouTube views is soooo 2013! What brands want today are high engagement rates. Engagement is the number of likes, comments, and shares per view. This will help you place a value on each view. For instance, if the engagement rate of a paid YouTube ad is 0.1% (one like or view per thousand), and the engagement of a YouTuber activation is 4% (40 likes and views per thousand), then a view of the YouTuber activation is worth 40x compared to a paid ad view.
You can also track likes, shares, and comments on Facebook on Twitter across your campaigns as well. However, while the engagement rate can be high on those platforms, you’ll want to keep in mind that some people on Facebook tend to click like before they watch (or without watching at all), while on YouTube it’s always after. So some people on Facebook may have liked the video without getting its message. Those watching on YouTube.com tend to be more engaged.
This is why brands like NYX, BH Cosmetics, ULTA, and Sigma Beauty have turned to working with YouTubers at scale. The engagement is higher, and the cost is lower. In short, it’s a strategy that works.
Start a movement — connect with your YouTube influencers today. We can help.
