Emmys 2018: Why Nominated Broadcasters are Missing a Trick on YouTube

Using Tubular data, we took a look at the official social video properties of the top nominated series in those categories, and how digital content around those shows is performing online. Surprisingly, while all shows had some visibility on YouTube, most of the broadcasters have thrown their weight behind Facebook, dedicating specific destination pages for the 7 series nominated in the Best Drama category, and the 8 series nominated in the Best Comedy category. Why Broadcasters are Missing a Trick with YouTube The major awards are divided into separate categories for drama and comedy. If we break down each Drama and Comedy nominee based on individual Facebook Pages and YouTube channels you can see that every show has its own individual Facebook Page which has no doubt been developed with a specific audience strategy in mind. Each of the 3 nominees (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”, “Barry”, and “Silicon Valley”) are generating an impressive number of Facebook views and engagements via their official Pages, but uploads to YouTube are processed via the main HBO channel so there’s little to no breakout visibility for each show. HBO has generated 192M YouTube views in the past 365 days with the following nominated shows part of that total: “Silicon Valley” 2.7M views “Curb Your Enthusiasm” 2.5M “Barry” 1.6M views And while “Barry” may have generated fewer YouTube views than its more established stablemates on the official HBO channel, uploads of content around the brand new show to that channel generated 1.5x the engagement rate of the platform average. It’s pretty much the same story for nominees in the Best Drama category, although HBO have created a standalone destination YouTube channel for “Game of Thrones”. But look at the average 30 day Facebook engagement rate the phenomenally successful “Stranger Things” has attracted over the past year – almost 7x the platform average! If Netflix created a standalone YouTube channel specifically for official content around this show, they could focus their video content strategy around a more targeted audience. Video content strategists should consider: Creating individual social properties for each series to give fans a dedicated destination site to follow.