To wrap up 2022, Tubular Labs assembled a lengthy collection of insights from the year in social video trends, top videos, creators and more. It’s worth digging into the entire “rewind” piece on the company’s blog, but as social video continues to grow — and even rival TV in some age groups — we wanted to pull out some of the biggest takeaways from 2022 below.

Shorts Are Tall For YouTube Creators

Honing in on U.S. YouTube channels, eight of the top 10 videos were shorts (under one-minute long), with all eight shorts uploaded by individual creators. Tops among those was Daniel LaBelle’s If Cleaning Was a Timed Sport. Part 2, which generated over 565 million views.

Creator content and shorts have grown at a staggering pace in recent years, and are increasingly successful ways for brands to get in front of audiences on social video as well. There’s an avenue for brands and publishers here as well — both Coke and ESPN’s SportsNation also had videos among the top 10 — though working with established and popular accounts like the LeoNata Family (13.5 billion YouTube views last year, and a 165% views increase year-over-year) could be the easier road in.

Music’s Global Nature

When looking at the top music videos on YouTube in 2022, Tubular noticed a focus away from U.S. performers. Ranked by V30 (views in the first 30 days from upload), non-U.S. artists like BLACKPINK, BTS and PSY were able to differentiate themselves above others.

Latin music also exploded in 2022, as nearly 34K uploaded videos amounted to more than 18 billion views for the year.

Interestingly, however, things were more U.S.- and U.K.-based when looking at sounds utilized for social videos. There, Harry Styles’s “As It Was” scored a dominating 27.6 billion views, followed by Lizzo’s “About Damn Time.” Styles also had over 1 million videos created using his music last year, with half of those utilizing “As It Was.”

Social Video Fueling Retail Comebacks

As Tubular notes in its “rewind” blog, brands like Abercrombie & Fitch and UGG both surged in 2022 due at least in part to social video popuarlity.

Abercrombie was particularly aware of the TikTok conversation going on around its brand and leaned into the video platform’s ability to drive both talk and sales among users. Engagements around hashtags like #abercrombie or #abercrombiehaul or #abercrombieandfitch climbed 260% year-over-year in Nov. 2022.

Holiday videos helped push a sales and web traffic bump for UGG, as data from Tubular showed. According to its Consumer Insights product, over 20% of Ugg.com visitors watched holiday content on social video.