YouTube Says It’s Still The One For Super Bowl Ads

YouTube wants to make it perfectly clear; it’s still the place to go to watch re-runs of Super Bowl commercials.

Facebook has elbowed into the market — with one report pegging the social network’s share of Super Bowl ad views at 25% — but YouTube reported in a blog post today that people are tuning in on YouTube more than ever.

We found that viewership is growing faster than before – people have watched more big game ads and teasers in the first six weeks of 2015 than all 52 weeks of 2014. More than 7M hours of big game ads and teasers have been watched on YouTube, up from 6.3M hours for all of 2014.

YouTube prefers to emphasize the hours-viewed metric, a not so subtle reminder that Facebook counts a user’s three-second pause over an autoplaying video as a view, but YouTube’s post-game views are also showing positive gains. As of Wednesday, Super Bowl ads and teasers had 415 million views since Jan. 1, up 53% over this time last year.

The ad showing the most post-game movement is the Clash of Clan’s Liam Neeson spot. The commercial has racked up more than 25 million views since Monday and pushed past the Budweiser “Lost Dog” ad to take the top spot in the YouTube top 10.

The heartwarming Bud ad had a head start; it was posted on YouTube five days before the game. The funny Clash of Clan’s bit — gruff-talking Neeson: “I don’t know you, BigBuffetBoy85. But if you think you can humiliate me and take my gold, think again.” — was posted at about 9 p.m. Eastern on Super Bowl Sunday. According to video marketing firm Pixability, the Neeson ad was viewed 566,272 times by midnight Sunday and in the next three days it got more than 25 million views. By Friday afternoon it had more than 31 million views, while the Bud ad had 25.8 million. (Interesting to note: as of Friday afternoon, the Clash ad had more than 8 million views on Facebook, 25% of the sum of YouTube and Facebook views on the ad).

Advance Posting Is Still A Key To Success

Pixability CTO Andreas Goeldi noted that seven of the top 10 most viewed videos were published before the day of the game and another — Nissan’s “With Dad” ad — used teasers featuring several popular YouTube creators. Fiat’s Blue Pin spot, now with 10 million views, also posted the night of the game. “Publishing early was clearly the best way to attract a large online audience,” Goeldi wrote in an email, “though in this case creative strategies from Clash of Clans and Fiat proved successful too.”

Here’s the YouTube top 10 as of this morning:

1. Clash of Clans: Revenge
2. Budweiser: Lost Dog
3. Bud Light: Real Life PacMan #UpForWhatever
4. T-Mobile: #KimsDataStash
5. BMW: BMW i3 – Newfangled Idea
6. Nissan:  With Dad
7. Snickers: The Brady Bunch
8. Mercedes-Benz: Fable
9. Fiat:  The FIAT Blue Pill | #500X
10. McDonald’s: Super Bowl XLIX Pay With Lovin’

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.