YouTube sees 80% lift in people watching sports highlight videos during the last year

In advance of this weekend’s Super Bowl LII game, YouTube has pulled together data around how people are watching — and searching for — sports-related video content on the site, and a few of the growth stats are quite remarkable.

There has been a 90 percent increase in searches for “football highlight” videos during the past year, YouTube reports. The company says that in addition to the rise in search activity, watch-time of sports highlight videos skyrocketed 80 percent between 2016 and 2017.

Watch-time growth of sports highlight videos on YouTube

Highlight videos were not the only sports-related content getting more views. Sports-related interview videos saw a 60 percent increase in watch-time, and funny sports video watch-time was up 50 percent.

YouTube reports 70 of the top 100 sports videos on its site have “great,” “greatest” or “best” in the videos’ titles.

Along with the rise in “football highlight” searches, YouTube found “how to” sports video searchers have doubled since 2016 and offered the following image to show which “how to” searches were most popular.

Increase in searches for ‘how to’ sports videos (by topic)

A Google-Ipsos study on sports viewing habits found 80 percent of sports viewers use a computer or mobile device while watching television broadcasts of live sporting events.

That same study indicates that 30 percent of viewers stream live sporting events from their mobile device.

Citing this research, Google announced this week that DoubleClick Bid Manager is launching tools to help advertisers coordinate ad spots on appearing during live televised events with digital activations, including video ads on YouTube.