YouTube is gearing up for another busy Super Bowl season, during which it will share all of the relevant commercials through its AdBlitz platform. This will be the tenth year of AdBlitz, and to celebrate that milestone, YouTube has compiled some data about the 20 most significant Super Bowl ads of the past decade. The most impressive stat: Those commercials, across their collective digital lifespans, have generated more than 440 million minutes of watch time on YouTube.
The list of the top 20 Super Bowl ads was compiled by looking at the view counts of branded videos in January and February. In the top position is Budweiser’s “Puppy Love” spot, which was a big winner during the 2015 Big Game. The Budweiser and Bud Light brands combined to grab two spots each within the top 20, though it was Volkswagen — led by its 2011 hit “The Force” — that claimed the most entries of any individual brand, with four.
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
The top 20 list reveals some interesting trends about the ways in which the consumption of Super Bowl ads has changed since YouTube started posting them all online. Many top commercials, such as this one from Pokemon, appeal to international audiences, who have increased their viewership of Super Bowl ads 28 times over since 2008. 90% of the top ads also bought into the strategy of uploading to YouTube before the Big Game itself, a trend that has gotten more extreme with each passing year. The aforementioned Pokemon ad, for example, was uploaded nearly two weeks before the 2016 Super Bowl.
The piece of data that most underscores YouTube’s importance as a piece of the Super Bowl puzzle concerns the longevity of ads that are posted online. Some of the entries within the top 20, including the 2013 Dodge spot “Farmer,” combined to receive five million views on YouTube in 2016, years after they were first published. That fact serves as a reminder that, for couch commercial critics, YouTube is now the place to be before, during, and after the Super Bowl.
