It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re covering TV series, movies, or digital video. Everywhere, you hear people talking about whether a piece of content is “a hit.” They talk about massive popularity, oftentimes without even raw numbers to back up those claims.

In the digital video world, you at least get to see view counts for videos. But what is a “view”? And, without context — without knowing how other similar videos are performing — how can any publisher or platform really call content a “hit”?

Enter Tubular’s new Video Categories capability, which provides this crucial context for digital video.

We’ll let Tubular CEO Rob Gabel explain it in his own words: “What we’ve done through data science and AI for the last 18 months is, we’ve developed a taxonomy, and we call it a ContentGraph, where we classify videos accordingly, up to 1 million topics, and all those topics into 1,400 structured categories."

What this means is that publishers can now compare their content with the competition on any number of specific fronts. Are Millennials really into cooking videos? Or just cooking videos by certain creators?

We’re already seeing companies use Tubular’s Video Categories to discover surprising insights about their own content. Digital media brand Brut., which recently joined the Global Video Measurement Alliance, launched in 2017, but expanded into the U.S. in late 2019. It has over 10 billion views, but that doesn’t in and of itself mean anything unless we know the context.

Using Tubular’s insights, Brut. learned that it’s already cracked the global top 10 in News & Politics on Facebook, as well as the global top 10 in Climate Change and Environmental Protection (again, on Facebook). That’s big news for Brut., which has a mission of creating socially conscious content.

“With video categories, publishers can equip their content strategists to create the best-performing videos and enable their media selling teams to better compete for advertising dollars in specific audience segments,” said Jackie Joyce, who spent nine years at Netflix as a senior manager of originals programming and content promotion strategy. Joyce's experience is crucial to the creation of these categories.

This kind of context is vital for digital video to prove it’s more than just a mass of impressions — it’s an incredibly vast, rich ecosystem that can in fact be measured in a way that provides useful, unique business insights.

“For brands and advertising agencies, media buying teams can more optimally allocate media dollars to specific target audiences based on deep content preferences, choosing the right publishing partners to engage and work with,” Joyce said.