Dive Brief:

• Wal-Mart’s holiday-related videos on YouTube have more than double the views of the second leading brand, reaching over 75 million views and counting, according to Marketing Land.
• The metrics come from video advertising platform Pixability. The second leading brand is Beats by Dre with under 30 million views of its holiday videos. The top ten is rounded out by Paramount, Pokemon, Duracell, 20th Century Fox, "Star Wars," Toys 'R' Us, Apple and Best Buy.
• According to Pixability, YouTube holiday content views have increased 65% year-over-year since 2011, with total views below 10 billion five years ago compared to this year’s holiday video view projection of more than 60 billion.

Dive Insight:

The stats underscore how consumers are spending more time viewing digital content and the opportunities this presents brands to reach potential customers at home or while on-the-go on their smartphones. Here's a peek at one of Wal-Mart's holiday Youtube videos:

Wal-Mart is driving its video performance during the fourth quarter with seasonal content and a holiday theme for its YouTube channel, showing how brands can engage holiday shoppers with a combination of a paid media strategy and a YouTube channel optimized for the season. 

One tactic for leveraging YouTube during the holidays is to create cross-over holiday content that takes advantage of some of the most trafficked subcategories on YouTube. Pixability's research shows that music is the top sub-category with 89 billion total views of seasonal tunes. The top non-music sub-categories are food, toys, unboxing and travel. The toys categories saw the most growth, at 88%, possibly related to YouTube Kids usage. 

Duracell provides a recent example of leveraging cross-over content with good results on YouTube. The brand's Star Wars-themed crossover content drove more than 9 million views this fall.

Although Wal-Mart is far and away the most popular brand on YouTube this holiday season, historically it is in third place behind Warner Bros. and Angry Birds, with Warner’s total views for holiday videos at almost 450 million. 

This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the 2016 holiday shopping season. You can browse our holiday page for more stories.