Brand Strategists Live on Other People's Channels

I split 48 marketers on YouTube into seven groups and looked at one question per group. Where are they watched?

For five of them the answer is clear. On their own channels. Copy and email people sit in between.

For brand and strategy people it is the opposite.

(The full split is in the count of 48 marketers on YouTube. This piece is just about one row of it.)

1% versus 99%

Here is the median share of views on the person's own channel, group by group:

• E-commerce and DTC: 99%
• Meta ads and creative: 96%
• Social and creators: 93%
• Offers, growth and B2B: 92%
• SEO and content: 88%
• Copy and email: 33%
• Brand and strategy: 1%

The typical brand strategist gets 1% of their YouTube views on a channel they run.

Across all 48, only 10 people get less than 10% on their own channel. Four of them are in this group of seven.

The seven

Chris Do is the exception. 98% on his own channel, and 61% of his views from shorts. He looks more like the creator groups than like his neighbours here.

Simon Sinek and Scott Galloway sit in the middle, with a bit under half on their own channels. TED alone has 34.3 million views of Sinek. Gartner for Marketing has 30.8 million of Galloway.

The other four are almost entirely on someone else's channels.

Add it all up and roughly half of the group's 1,263 million views happen on channels they don't run.

And that is a floor. Other people's videos only count when the name is in the title, description or channel name. When I did a deeper pass on Rory Sutherland alone, his views doubled to 146 million.

Fewer shorts, too

The group gets 32% of its views from shorts. Across all 48 it is 51%.

Long videos carry the rest. About half of the group's views come from videos over ten minutes.

What I make of it

One reading: brand strategy is a talk-and-interview subject. It travels as a guest spot on a podcast or a stage, and the channel belongs to the host.

Growth and e-commerce people, by contrast, are watched almost entirely on channels they run.

Same platform, two completely different ways of being watched.

So what does this have to do with you?

If you only track a competitor's own channels, you see the e-commerce half of the picture. For some brands, most of the reach lives on channels they don't own.

Pick one competitor and see what is already working for them. The first benchmark is free: one domain, measured against you, no card and no call.