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The Best Back-to-School Audiences on YouTube

Aug 3, 2019 | Audience Intelligence, Influencer Identification & Attribution, Media & Entertainment

By Stacy Tsultsumova

The month of August is here, which means that Back-to-School shopping season is peaking. Parents around the country are looking for the best deals for supplies and kid clothing, while companies are advertising heavily trying to reach its core audience during the annual Back-to-School frenzy. At StatSocial we recognize an opportunity when a social media trend correlates with an increase in commercial activity. Back-to-School season is a perfect way for us to demonstrate a brand new feature of our audience reports — specifically YouTube channel insights. For this analysis, we identify which YouTube channels are most relevant to Back-to-School shopping enthusiasts.

While advertising optimization has been traditionally focused on reach, forward-thinking brands are optimizing for ROI. Understanding the niche audiences that are best aligned is the first step in that process.

These insight can inform media buyers, very quickly increasing efficiency in targeting their most relevant audience while leveraging YouTube’s incredible reach. Media sellers on YouTube can also leverage this data to optimize their pitches and campaigns, ensuring they work with the best possible advertisers most aligned with their audience.

Methodology

We looked back over the past 30 days to identify a sample of approximately 25,000 consumers engaging with popular back-to-school (B2S) hashtags, including #back2school, #backtoschool, and #”backtoschool.” We then overlaid that audience against the 10,000+ media properties in our taxonomy, which now includes nearly 1,500 YouTube channels.

Back-to-School Audience Demographics

The B2S enthusiasts are then compared to the average American on social media, built off a baseline of more than 100 million people. We then can pinpoint what makes the back-to-school enthusiasts unique across a variety of demographic, psychographic, and affinity data points. Right off the bat, and perhaps not surprisingly, this is a majority female crowd.

StatSocial’s Media Taxonomy

Every StatSocial audience report includes over 10,000 media properties, encompassing movies, TV shows, YouTube channels, podcasts, websites, and more. Let’s zoom in on the YouTube channel affinities.

The leading YouTube categories for the pre-dominantly female B2S crowd are Music, Entertainment, HowTo, and Comedy. Interestingly, all of these top categories have a significant over-index which demonstrates that B2S audience is 3–4 times more into Music, Entertainment, Comedy and HowTo content on YouTube than an average social media user.

Back-to-School enthusiasts love YouTube

If we look at YouTube’s share within the entire media world, YouTube channels have the highest over-index compared to the other types of media.

Back-to-School Shoppers Favorite YouTube Music Channels

Now, let`s drill down the YouTube taxonomy and identify which channels are most loved by the B2S enthusiasts. Starting with Music, we see that our audience enjoys watching videos of Post Malone, Childish Gambino, Kodak Black and TayZonday. All of these artists are significantly over-indexed against the average American, validating the fact that B2S enthusiasts strongly prefer these musicians on YouTube.

Back-to-School Shoppers Favorite YouTube Entertainment Channels

Next up are Entertainment channels on YouTube. James Charles is leading in this category with a whopping 752 index score! It means that B2S audience likes/shares/tags James Charles 7 times more than an average social media user. James Charles is an American internet personality, makeup artist, and model known for being the first male CoverGirl spokesperson. It is predictable that the women in this audience are interested in makeup, yet… out of a myriad of Internet personalities, celebrities and performers, James Charles gathers the most over-indexed fandom.

Back-to-School Shoppers Favorite YouTube Comedy Channels

Moving on to Comedy-focused YouTube channels. We can see that our target audience is watching MANY comedians. There is no single comedy channel on YouTube that takes up a lion`s share of the B2S group. On the opposite, our audience likes a very wide range of channels that produce comedy content. Nonetheless, we can still see that Tana Mongeau and DJ Akademics have a significantly higher interest from the B2S than from average social media users in the US.

Back-to-School Shoppers Favorite YouTube HowTo Channels

In the HowTo segment, Jackie Aina is leading the chart of the top HowTo vloggers for our group of interest. Her channel has a huge overindex of 1,846. None of the other channels from Music, Entertainment or Comedy segments have such a strong affinity to a seemingly niche beauty influencer: only 0.25% of social media users follow Jackie Aina online. It is very interesting that our B2S share so much affinity for this specific HowTo YouTuber.

Back-to-School Shoppers Top Influencer Categories

Across Back-to-School audience’s top YouTube categories, Music has the most concentrated interest around the top channels whereas Entertainment, Comedy, and HowTo interest is much more dispersed among dozens of channels. We cross-checked this fact by researching Statsocial’s influencer taxonomy in the B2S report. Music was the leading influencer category, which shows that Music content is important to the B2S crowd within YouTube as well as outside of it.


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Author: Stacy Tsultsumova

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