At the outset of 2022, we were facing a challenge: Radically reinvent Etsy's flagship social media channel while maintaining the essence of what makes our brand so special: unique, well-crafted items from our vast community of small businesses. Our goal: To transform Etsy's Instagram as more than a place to showcase our seller's incredible items, but to showcase it as a vibrant, joyful community - and do it through video.
With content consumption rapidly evolving away from static images in favor of short-form video, this posed a unique challenge for our brand. Historically, we'd heavily relied on the millions of stunning product images uploaded by our creator community for their product listings, but there was nowhere near equivalent scale for video. So how do you tell the story of your brand through video when you don't actually have access to video, video production and don't own the product?
We landed on two-pronged approach to achieving our goal of radically reinventing the Etsy Instagram as a video-first experience in order to bring the joy Etsy to life, both of which highlight what makes our community unique: our talented small businesses creators and our enthusiastic buyer community.
First, we turned to our incredibly talented seller community, relying on a mixture of co-created and existing social content, doing outreach through seller shops as well as discovery through their own social presences to promote their work.
Second, we turned to the Instagram creator community, to represent the buyer side of Etsy. After all, what is a well-crafted item without someone who finds it special? We partnered with a wide array of video creators to help us express the joy of supporting small business through an Etsy purchase.
With our team of buyer-creators, we were able to have some fun with the brand to extend Etsy's cultiral relevance. From higly relatable content for the 'early to bed on New Years' crowd, to a unique spin on the Butter Board trend, we enlisted our creators to create of-the-moment content around Etsy's offerings. They also embracing the change of seasons to make our sellers' items fit into every moment. And it wasn't all fun and games, they also found ways to create around resuable swaps to make your kitchen more sustainable and took on DIY wallpaper projects.
Through the lens of our seller community, we were able to tell many incredible stories, from the story a seller who,has been telling the story of one couple through snowman ornaments for nearly a decade, to the heartbreaking story of a Ukranian who was forced to flee her home as a result of the Russian invasion. That, and we were able to co-create some incredible content through remote capture that helped us to show our audience how mesmerizing the art of glass blowing or making a concrete coaster can be.
We were also able to tell compelling stories around our sellers' culture and identity, like how this embroidery artist's Hispanic heritage informs her work, and this inspiring couple who showcase their pride by expressing themselves through their creative work.
In addition to our original and co-created content, we also were able to find success optimizing and posting some incredible seller-created videos that beautifully showcase creative processes such as avocado dying and this hypnotic resin process and even an adorable cat hammock.
Through these focused efforts, we were able to not only increase our video output, but do so in a way that brought greater returns, increasing our output and audience in each successive quarter.
We stared the year with 19M videos in Q1, and ended it with 44M in Q4, resulting in a 126% overall increase year over year. These results are also notable in that they were achieved with great efficiency, since we only increased overall video output by 70%, and overall year-to-year investment in staffing and budget was flat.
More importantly, we were able to tell incredible compelling stories about the Etsy brand and our seller and buyer community in ways that had not been done before, digging deeper into the millions of compelling stories happening through small business purchases each day.
