• by Wayne Friedman , November 10, 2017

One of the bigger areas of entertainment viewing on YouTube is TV shows — especially when TV fans interact with content. And that’s a big opportunity for major TV advertisers, according to one ad-tech company.

“Data shows much of that [TV show] audience will migrate to YouTube to extend the conversation,” says Rich Raddon, co-founder/co-CEO of Zefr. “The numbers are pretty staggering."

For example, HBO Go fan-related content — fan channels, reviews, re-uploads and other content — has totaled 10.8 billion views on YouTube to date. This is compared to “official” content from HBO that has posted 300 million views.

Netflix-related fan content generates a massive 4.7 billion views, with official network content pulling in 1.2 billion views — 77% of it from YouTube views.

Raddon says Zefr, which offers brand advertisers/media platforms contextually targeted video packages on YouTube, can help marketers — especially with heightened concerns over brand-safety issues.

Toby Byrne, former president of advertising sales for Fox Networks Group, now president of Zefr, says this is one of the reasons he came to the company — to put together video platforms with the scale You Tube offers.

“When I learned what they do — curating packages aligned for content, and therefore meaningful and for relevant for brands — [I realized] it was akin to what I did all those years in selling premium entertainment and sports content on Fox.”

A recent Zefr research report says that when it comes to new over-the-top (OTT) services, TV fans on the big YouTube platform are likely to have a strong influence on programming and platforms.

For example, HBO”s “Game of Thrones” has pulled in more than 7 billion views in its lifetime — making it the most popular show across all platforms. Zefr says the popular Netflix show “Stranger Things” takes in 3 million daily views.

Hulu and Amazon are posting smaller results than HBO Go and Netflix — with Hulu taking in 963 million fan-content views and Amazon 153 million fan-content views. Some 84% of Hulu’s overall views come from fan-content and 48% for Amazon.