On YouTube this summer, movie fans are outstripping studio marketing teams when it comes to posting trailers based on this summer’s biggest hits like “Jurassic World” — and they’re far more popular.
That’s the takeaway from new data released Friday by Zefr, a tech firm utilized by studios to track and target YouTube content.
That YouTube has evolved into a major movie marketing platform is well known. The trailer for the summer’s biggest hit “Jurassic World” has been viewed 103 million times — just under the one for this weekend’s animated hit “Minions,” which has logged 108 million views.
But what’s surprising is that the majority of YouTube’s movie-related videos were uploaded not by studios, but by fans making their own custom content like remixes, tributes and the increasingly popular “trailer reaction” videos. And the numbers are not even close.
Universal posted 212 “Jurassic World” videos, while fans put up 34,000. The fan videos were viewed 384 million times, compared to 154 million for the studio-created content. And fan-made “Minions” videos were viewed 435 million times, far outpacing official videos with 97 million views.
To be fair, the majority of the fans’ videos were based on or included studio content, but those are wide margins.
“It shows the power of fans, and the need to speak to your audience,” said Jacob Rokeach, Zefr’s director of marketing, who formerly worked in marketing at Sony Pictures.
Here’s the data on the summer’s five most popular trailers on YouTube:
