As a Gen Z focused digital video brand, AwesomenessTV saw a major opportunity to expand their social video presence with the debut of IGTV in June 2018. As a leading voice for the Gen Z audience on YouTube, it was paramount that we be an early adopter of the vertical video platform. We created a fully fleshed out programming slate and calendar that would lead to view counts similar to that of our YouTube presence.
In the summer of 2018, AwesomenessTV not only set out to create a vehicle to further drive organic viewership and grow our Instagram audience, but also to create new opportunities to market our premium content on streaming services and to collaborate with our brand partners. We've accomplished this and more with AwesomenessTV's IGTV channel which has generated over 84M lifetime views to date.
Instagram's IGTV platform went live on June 20, 2018. Within 12 hours of Instagram's long form video app announcement, AwesomenessTV launched their IGTV channel based on 4 key factors. The first, ATV pop culture micro videos were seeing an average 45% MOM increase in video views via Instagram feed during Spring/Summer 2018. Second, on average our Instagram feed views were coming from Discovery and explore app features. Third, on average our followers were consuming 1K videos on Instagram a month. Fourth, according to Instagram, mobile video would account for 78% of total mobile traffic by 2021.
Through timely and effective collaboration of AwesomenessTV's social media editors, pop culture & lifestyle producers, and the talent partnerships team, we were able to create and execute the aforementioned programming calendar and launch on the same day as the platform announcement.
On June 20, 2018 AwesomenessTV's IGTV channel went live as a self-proclaimed, "professional stan account" dedicated to all things pop culture from celebrity to YouTube. The channel leverages both highly produced weekly and daily original unscripted formats leveraging both traditional and influencer talent. ATV IGTV videos range from 1 to 5-minute runtimes, with our sweet spot being around 3 minutes. Notable series include The Daily Report, Pop'n Culture, Celebrity Drinks Decoded, CelebriEATS, and red carpet Would You Rathers.
These formats lean into vertical video and platform best practices such as on-screen captions for sound-off viewing, click enticing titles, original thumbnails, and an Instagram Story strategy leveraging 15 sec episode promos and the Swipe Up link feature. They also feature mainstream talent like Noah Centineo, Lana Condor, KJ Apa, and Cierra Ramirez as well as digital creators like The Merrell Twins, Brent Rivera, Eva Gutowski, and Ricky Dillon.
Since launch, the AwesomenessTV IGTV channel has garnered just under 84M lifetime views across the entire content library, 67.4M of which were generated in 2018 alone. Since channel launce we've also seen an average 33% WOW increase in lifetime video views, as well as an average of 43% WOW increase in total weekly views.
As an early adopter of the Instagram video extension platform, ATV has received a huge boost in organic pickup from the Instagram Explore algorithm. ATV content is being featured prominently across Explore pages and our "breaking news" titling structure is bringing in viewers via Instagram app IGTV notifications atop users' home feed. And as expected, our pop culture content continues to be our top view driving video category.
Our most notable series to date on IGTV is micro daily news format The Daily Report, which has driven over 80M+ lifetime views as well as each episode seeing an average of 613.3K lifetime views. Please see below other notable series and their average views per episode.
As Told Through Texting – 1.1M AVV
CelebriEATS – 744K AVV
Celeb Drinks Decoded – 622K AVV
Celeb Straight to Camera (Would You Rather, Talent Q&As, etc) – 659K AVV
In addition to above, our first to market strategy, daily programming schedule, platform endemic formats, and commitment to platform optimization has allowed us to surpass our key industry competitors significantly in terms of lifetime viewership on IGTV. On IGTV ATV has generated:
1,667% more lifetime views than Seventeen Magazine
18,542% more lifetime views than Teen Vogue Magazine
74,397% more lifetime views than J-14 Magazine
83,585% more lifetime views than Buzzfeed's As/Is
138,703% more lifetime views than Sweety High