Walmart Dominates YouTube During Thanksgiving Holiday Period With 39 Million Video Views

Walmart showed everyone who was boss last weekend on social networks, online sales, and now, YouTube.

Not only did the brand rank as the top social performer among retailers, Walmart’s website generated 1.5 billion page views from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday – contributing to what it claims was its best day ever for online sales.

With such outstanding online engagement, it’s no surprise the brand also outperformed their competition on YouTube as well. What is surprising is just how badly they beat other retailers.

According to video metrics platform Pixability, Walmart generated more than 39 million video views on its YouTube channel between November 19 and December 2, owning 50 percent of total channel views for the top 100 retail brands on the site.

Pixability extended its holiday video tracking a week out from Thanksgiving because it says YouTube advertising is a different kind of animal than blasting a national ad campaign via the major television networks.

[blockquote cite=”Pixability”]YouTube advertising works fundamentally different than TV advertising. November 19, a week before Thanksgiving, is when the big advertisers this year started their Black Friday push.[/blockquote]

(When narrowing the time period to Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday, Walmart gained 12,334,242 views, with 3.2 million views on Black Friday and 3 million on Cyber Monday.)

For the November 19 through December 2 stretch, Foot Locker followed Walmart with only 12 million views. At three million, Target earned 25 million fewer views than Walmart.

YouTube Video Views For Top 10 Retail Channels

(DD is Dunkin Donuts, V.S. Victoria’s Secrets, and HEB a grocery chain located in Texas and Mexico.)

Pixability said the top 100 retail brands on YouTube generated a total of 76+ million views from November 19 through December 2, and added more than 64,000 subscribers. Of all the brand channels, Walmart and Foot Locker owned two-thirds of the all views during the specified time period.

[pullquote]60% of the highly viewed content were fresh videos published after November 1 onward, but some legacy content from months, and even years back, picked up 100,000+views.[/pullquote]

Analyzing the number of YouTube videos shared on Facebook, Pixability reports Foot Locker was far ahead of other retailers with more than 350,000 Facebook video shares. Walmart’s videos earned 13,000 Facebook shares.