Commentary

There's A Lot Of YouTube Talk About Beauty, But Least Of All By Brands

Maybe some video marketing is made more difficult because the category is just so popular. That is one of the conclusions to be drawn from a new report about all the YouTube sites that deal with beauty.

There’s a lot of interest in being beautiful. A lot. We're so vain.

The short story: Each month, YouTube shows 700 million video views about beauty products and tips. But as OnlineVideoNet.com points out, “Only 2% of those views come from viewers who subscribe to channels run by major beauty brands, and YouTube currently has 45,000 beauty channels not run by brands.”

To put it another way, there are 14.9 billion existing video views about beauty products on YouTube—and only 511 million of them came from the brands that make the products.    

Pixability, a company that specializes in noodling on YouTube audiences and channels, studied the beauty thing, and issued a really different report, “Beauty on YouTube: How YouTube is Radically Transforming the Beauty Industry and What That Means for Brands.” 

The report notes, for example, that back in 2010, beauty-related content averaged 300 million views a month. Three years later, as reported above, that’s more than doubled.

The funny/strange/scary thing is: People who are into cosmetics are so into the subject that they can produce more beauty-related videos, and faster, than the companies that make and market the products.

That might be why beauty vloggers now have 10 times more videos on their channels than beauty brands, and the vloggers publish content seven times more frequently than beauty brands.

Pixability concludes those brands are under-investing in “long form tutorials” about…beauty, and over-investing in “publishing less popular commercials.”

One very big beauty site, the StyleHaul network, consists of so many channels its only estimates its own size. Right now, there are about 3,700 StyleHaul-connected channels in 61 countries and with more than 115 million subscribers. But that figure changes a little bit, all the time.

During the Grammys and for the upcoming Academy Awards, the Associated Press enlisted a StyleHaul star, iJustine, to provide expert comment. You may not have ever heard of her, but she has nearly 2 million subscribers. She is, to most of the world, anonymous. To people in the fashion/cosmetics/beauty world, she’s a heavyweight.

Pixability looked at channels run by 168 brands, and thousands of vloggers. Said OnlineVideoNet: “What it found is that YouTube is driving significant changes in how people learn about, use, and buy beauty products, but the beauty brands spending millions on advertising aren’t driving that discussion.”

That’s an curious fact at a time that marketing seems otherwise so sharp and pervasive.

But from a male, non-beauty perspective, the beauty vlogs sound like the kind of discussion places, such as talk radio and sports Web sites, that baseball fans have. They surely over-produce excited opinions about third basemen and muscle-heavy sluggers. No major league baseball team could duplicate that kind of tonnage--for which they don’t pay a dime. Or at least not a lot of dimes.

And while those sports talk shows on radio and TV aren’t necessarily saying nice things, they keep the conversation going. In the long run, teams would probably rather have that happen than be ignored. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder. But it's always nice to be noticed.

pj@mediapost.com   

 

    

 

  

 

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