Brand content is growing in popularity on YouTube, and brands are accomplishing this by studying the platform’s most popular creators.

As part of YouTube’s tenth anniversary, the people at Google decided to look at how brand content was taking off on the platform. Starting with the list of the top 100 brands as defined by the Interbrand 2014 Best Global Brands ranking, Google then asked the YouTube marketing experts at Pixability to dig into the data and see how video activity has changed for those brands.

The results are eye-opening, and a lesson for any companies that want to grow their YouTube presence. YouTube viewing for the top 100 brands almost doubled in the last year.

• The top 100 brands have accumulated a total of 40 billion views on YouTube
• 18 billion of those views happened in the last year.

How are top brands pulling this off? By looking at YouTube’s top video creators and learning what works.

• Top brands publish new content on a regular basis to encourage fans to return.
• Thursday is the most popular day to post new content, followed by Tuesday and Wednesday. Seeing videos mid-week gives them an SEO boost for weekend search activity
• Collectively, the top 100 brands upload a new YouTube video every 18.5 minutes.

Brands are investing more in YouTube original content and taking chances.

• 10 percent of YouTube brand videos are over 10 minutes long.
• The number of advertisers investing in video ads is up 40 percent year-over-year.

All that effort is paying off.

• The top 100 brands got 85 percent more views in 2015 than in 2014.
• Channel subscriptions grew 47 percent year-over-year.

For more on the top 100 brands on YouTube, check out this infographic.