A recent study by HypeAuditor and The Remarkables Group examined 55,000 influencers on Instagram and YouTube with predominantly Australian-based audiences. Perhaps most revealing is the dominance of YouTube by male audiences.
YouTube as a social media channel has one of the largest population reach in Australia. In Sept 2019, there were 15 million monthly unique visitors on YouTube. That is 59.16% of the total population.
How does that potential scale compare to other channels?
Comparatively Roy Morgan research shows that TV reaches 19.6 million (Mar 2018) and Facebook reaches 17 million. There are 11.5 million subscribers to Netflix (July 2019). As such, Instagram is actually small in comparison with 9 million active monthly users in Australia.
YouTube is home to many of Australia's largest internet personalities and has become a place where people tune into compelling videos, sometimes for over 10 minutes, to the daily moments surrounding an endless number of topics. YouTube creators, also known as YouTubers, offer an incredible opportunity to connect with consumers.
Traditional TV network’s bread and butter are news and sports programming. But a large portion of Australian males are tuning into the daily lives and light hearted entertainment available on YouTube. The YouTube Australian audience is mostly male (68.7%). This could represent a unique opportunity to reach more males online.
Top 5 Australian based channels with predominantly (60%+) Australian, male audiences:
- Superwog1 1.4M
- Isaac Butterfield 1.1M
- Brodie Moss 1.1M
- Fairbairn Films 877K
- Nick Fry 676K
- Shammi 636 K
Source: HypeAuditor Dec 2019.
Shammi plays over-the-top pranks on family and friends for our enjoyment. Shammi’s audience is 70% male with the largest percentage of them being aged 25-35 years of age.
Nick Fry is happily documenting the Aussie, laidback lifestyle with camping and hunting trips, regularly topping 1 million viewers.
Male YouTubers such as Shammi and Nick have more than one million subscribers and consistently deliver over 100,000+ views per video.
If you're wanting to reach males, and whilst this content should be approached with caution, it does demonstrate the style and tone audiences love watching. It is important for you to become familiar with some of these channels and the nature of the content, as it is very different from other mainstream channels. Most Australian brands aren't even considering YouTube influencers, so the opportunity is still there to be exploited.
So how do you harness these audiences to grow your brand?
The most dominant topics are People & Blogs channels (23.2%) followed by Entertainment (16.8%) & Music (12.44%). These statistics signal what tone and style brands should consider integrating into their own campaigns.
People and Blogs - or ‘vloggers’ as they’re referred to on YouTube, put their lives on display. Audiences follow along weekly to watch their general daily routines and key life moments. This is an opportunity to organically integrate your brand/product into authentic content that viewers are watching with the very intention of being inspired.
Take the example of Stephen and Jess, the faces behind the successful travel YouTube channel and blog, ‘Flying The Nest’. With a 1039 video catalogue on YouTube, making them expert storytellers, they use their channel to inspire and record their adventures to share with their children later in life. They recently shared their pregnancy news with their fans and saw 315K views.
The ‘Entertainment’ style videos are the second most widely-watched space on YouTube that brands can align with. Marketers might find it hard to find their place amongst the jokers and comics of YouTube. And it wouldn’t be without its risks. But get it right and they could develop a cult-like customer-base, just like these YouTubers.
Brands should avoid using their gut feelings when choosing any influencer, be very familiar with their catalogue of videos, put agreements in place, work closely with the influencer in the ideation phase and put the right approval processes in place. Another tip is to look at a longer term program with a handful of high quality YouTubers that share the same values as your brand.
Marketers need data to help them make better decisions about which types of influencers to work with on which channels for their key objectives. Most of the social media commentary and hype currently focuses on Instagram, as the platform of the moment. But these statistics highlight it’s important to come back to the data and research when planning the right channels and formats to reach your marketing objectives.
Together with HypeAuditor, The Remarkables Group have conducted research with the most current Instagram and YouTube influencer insights and benchmarks. Also covered is the challenging topic of influencer fraud.
Read more from The 2019 Australian Influencer Landscape report here.
Natalie Giddings is the Managing Director of The Remarkables Group.