Brands advocating for the LGBTQ community find a massive audience on YouTube

It’s Pride Month, and YouTubers are taking to the platform to celebrate the LGBTQ community. Tyler Oakley — the most popular LGBTQ creator — is releasing a series of videos titled ‘My Chosen Family,’ sharing stories about LGBTQ history and culture and giving a voice to the disenfranchised. In this year’s political climate, we’ve also seen advertisers find stronger voices for advocacy, creating purpose-driven content that connects with consumers on a deeper level, across a variety of issues.

On YouTube, brands that advocate for Pride and LGBTQ content have found success in engaging this vast, passionate audience that shares their values. Pixability’s data shows that audiences have viewed LGBTQ video ads from the top 100 brands nearly 3B times, and engaged with these ads more than 250K times. Currently, roughly 3% of the top brands’ purpose-driven ads are devoted to Pride content.

Here’s a look at the overall LGBTQ space across YouTube:

All-time viewership of LGBTQ content has reached over 7B views, across nearly 30K channels. Videos in the space receive an overwhelmingly positive response — 95% of engagements are likes — and this audience amplifies the reach of this space through an additional 15M shares to Facebook.

Viewership of LGBTQ content is rising exponentially each year. In 2016, views of LGBTQ content increased by 76% year-over-year — and Pixability forecasts that the space will attract nearly 5B annual views in 2017.

The most popular creator in this growing space is Tyler Oakley, with 8 million subscribers and a playlist dedicated solely to LGBTQ content — followed by Todrick Hall and Connor Franta.

Coming out videos are by far the most popular type of video in the LGBTQ space, while views of marriage equality videos peaked in the summer of 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage.

By producing authentic videos that advocate for and empower the LGBTQ community, brand marketers can establish a connection with this passionate audience that shares their common values. For example, Smirnoff celebrated the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling by hosting a wedding ceremony between two grooms, sending a clear message that ‘love wins.’ The unique approach and authentic message resonated with a massive YouTube audience, generating more than 800,000 views.

Above all, brands must bring authenticity to their purpose-driven marketing, and commit fully to their chosen ideals, in order to drive impact.