Roger is a three-time attendee. He’s like part of the staff now, pretty much. But obviously, sports are a huge part of the YouTube platform. Views of sports-related content have tremendous watch time growth rates on our platform. I think it’s over 30%, and buyers definitely like live sports. They make that clear. They especially love the NFL. The NFL always drives strong viewership. We enjoy our partnership with the NFL. We were going into Year Three. We obviously have Sunday Ticket on YouTube. We have a lot of the shoulder content of creators going into the locker room.
What we love about sports and what we love about it on YouTube is where we can bridge the event and the culture around it, and we find that’s what advertisers love the most on YouTube. We can put NFL games on, but then we can put IShowSpeed, or Destroying, or Halle Bailey in the environment around the game and talk about the benefit of it. You can put a Kelce’s brother podcast around the game, and it’s 24/7, while a game is three hours. So we love the ability to have the right amount of live content. We’re excited about the NFL game with the right amount of culture around it. Mix is magic for advertisers.
How are you building sponsorships around content?
We announced at our presentation that when we’re talking to advertisers, we’re asking about, “How do you advertise in the moment?” and “What are you building around it in your activation?” That’s why sponsorships was such a big highlight for us because you can really build strategy around an event versus just advertising it.
[Mary Ellen Coe, YouTube chief business officer,] showed the golf [example] on the screen. You can see the difference between just advertising in the tournament versus a buy on Bryson [DeChambeau’s] channel. Whenever he has a Drop 50 episode, it has a tremendous amount of coverage. You could see the work that they did to create and customize content. Then you can start to advertise at scale using the AI tools to those same audiences that have shown interest on the platform. We think that is the magic formula. There are a lot of sports fans who spend way more time watching non-game content than game content, and we want advertisers to reach both.
Lady Gaga closed Brandcast, but throughout the presentation, there was a lot of mention of how she’s been such a big part of the YouTube brand. Why was she the artist that you felt made sense to celebrate the 20th anniversary?
First of all, she was amazing. She was fantastic. There are a couple of areas that make her appealing on YouTube. She is the YouTube experience. She’s one of the original artists that learned how to leverage and build a fandom on digital platforms. She was obviously big on YouTube—creating videos and launching her career. If you think back, you can remember all the Little Monsters in the Get Ready With Me videos to get ready for concerts. She has built a great fandom and culture around her music, her content, and that’s what YouTube’s about. It’s having a talented, authentic artist having a personal connection to fans and building their career and communities out of it. She demonstrates that well.
