• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, August 1, 2014

Now, this is fun. Touchstorm, the tech company whose analytics try to match advertisers with the most appropriate YouTube channels, just released a new and fascinating study that breaks down the most popular outdoor and adventure sports on YouTube channels.

It uses Voot, a software interface that can suss out topics, conversation, language and talent among many other things.

From that info, Touchstorm built a video index that further squeezes out info on subscribers, passion, conversion and a bunch of other measures.

The new 62-page report, which is free to read, is enough fun it should take up the rest of your Friday paging through it.  Alison Provost, Touchstorm CEO, would be expected to say “the breadth of this report is mind-blowing,” because, after all, it’s her company. But in this case, she’s absolutely right.

As reported by Stream Daily, the super-fine Red Bull channel is the most viewed outdoor/active sports channel, with 826.5 million views. Altogether, 29 million viewers subscribe to outdoor and adventure channels, with 8.1 billion views.   

Skateboarding and parkour make up eight of the top 10 channels, with airsoft, bushcraft, geocaching, tricking and slacking ranking as the next popular sports. (I don’t know what most of these are. There. I said it.)

The report measures, basically, 38 different kinds of outdoor/adventure-type activities, and 3,166 YouTube channels.  

The Touchstorm data also measured these activities by what Touchstorm calls "conversation." So for example, once you get past the huge “adventure sports, general” you see that skateboarding is right up there with survival skills and bushcraft.

Measuring passion, parkour and freerunning rules, with tricking (I must look that up) and Frisbee and trampolining right up there.

This report says 37% of the views are to sites operated by brands, and they make up something like 26% of all the channels there are in the category. You should underline that in your brain because, to me, that’s a perfect indicator of how content is replacing traditional advertising for some brands.

In this category, no other “type” comes close. “TV or Cable Network” YouTube channels in the outdoor/adventure category account for 11% of the total views, really small when you consider that one down with just a slightly smaller piece of the pie chart, with 10%, are channels just put out there by John and Mary Q. Videohead.

One delightful and sensible stat—counting the average number of videos per channel, based on different kinds of outdoor/adventure types—points out that a successful channel has the most videos. Naturally! And which do you think those might be? “Channels in the Base Jumping/Sky Diving/Wingsuits topic post more videos per channel than any other topic — an average of 592 videos per channel.”

Like I said. A fascinating report, and one that makes you realize how so many people around the world can be interested in so many things, and how online video via the Internet is a uniquely perfect way to serve them.

pj@mediapost.com