• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, June 18, 2015

YouTube’s hold on the online video market is firmly established but a new research tool from Tubular is going to start reporting the “Top Video Creators Across Platforms,” which, in its first report has some surprises.  

The top creator, for May, is not one of them. It’s BuzzFeed. Of course, it’s BuzzFeed. But the numbers are fascinating. It grabbed 859 million video views last month--536 million of them (62%) on Facebook and just 323 million view, or 38%, on YouTube.

The list gets way more weird from there, with the second and third spots occupied by creator sites that aren’t household names, or at least I don't think so. Vlechten Met Daan (Braids by Daan), is a English-language but Dutch run beauty and lifestyle site, and it got 732 million views, mostly on Facebook. The Brazilian music portal Acervo Arrrocha was third with 627 million views. 

Interesting is that a couple kids’ toy sites make the list, but as the Tubular-owned Website ReelSEO points out, they have extremely low levels of engagement, because, even though parents like to teach kids to be generous, it’s still difficult to share videos when you’re just two years old.

One exclamation point for me was that 18-year old Lele Pons was in the Top 10 list, and she just does Vines. Very good and funny ones, but still. They got 414 million views, good for seventh on the list, right after WWE (418 million) and she outdistanced PewDiePie,who was ninth with 324 million.

The figures give some additional flesh to the Facebook brags. It recently claimed it gets 4 billion video views a day,four times what it got a year ago. Fortune reported thatas of last February only a quarter of the its videos were uploaded directly to the site. Now, it’s 70%.

Tubular also counts the top 10 creators on YouTube alone, and again those baby-toy sites are up there. FunToyzCollector (449 million views) was the top channel and Baby Big Mouth was third (355 million). In between was Taylor Swift's VEVO channel. It’s an illuminating chart.

CAT WATCHING: If you’re in the online video biz, you’ve probably had it up to here about cat videos from your wise guy friends. Those little videos are sweet, and so insufferable. And now, they’ve been studied, too.

Assistant professor Jessica Gall Myrick at Indiana University, surveyed almost 7,000 people about their reasons viewing of cat videos (imagine those conversations!) and how it affects their moods. One hopes no federal funds were used.

Here are some findings about cat-video watchers:

--They were more energetic and felt more positive after watching, and had fewer negative emotions;

-- As a type, people who have certain traits, like agreeability and shyness, are cat videos’ best friends, and;

--Only 36% would describe themselves as “cat people,” and only one-in-four went looking for cat videos. They just happened to them.  

Myrick wanted to find out if if watching cat videos actually made people feel worse, for wasting time like that. But she found “the pleasure they got from watching cat videos outweighed any guilt they felt about procrastinating.”

That’s too bad.

pj@mediapost.com