Davis: The majority of YouTube views now occur on smart TVs
Ryan Davis · Stanford Found More Brand Notes Made the Content Perform Worse · Jun 17, 2025 · at 26:40
Ryan Davis, co-founder of People First, discusses shifting media consumption habits and the changing nature of YouTube viewership.
0:00 / 0:03exact quote · 4.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Like now the majority of YouTube views are happening on smart TVs, right?”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ryan Davis
Stanford study found restrictive brand instructions worsen creator content performance
“Stanford University did a big study that we provided some data for where they looked at hundreds of thousands of influencer contracts, and then they looked at the content that was produced from those contracts, and they found that the more specific the brand w…”
Davis: AI Content Will Not Perform as Well as Authentic Human Content
“I think AI content is not going to perform as well as sort of real authentic human content.”
Davis: Nano-influencers with 2k to 5k followers deliver highest brand ROI
“Down in the follower count and what we call like the nano and the micro and these people with like two, three, four or 5000 followers and above you know, that's where you're seeing the highest performing content, the best return on, on investment for brands.”
Davis: Sourcing niche B2B creators is hard because experts resist paid sponsorships
“It wasn't hard to necessarily find the experts, but it was hard to find the experts who wanted to opt in to getting paid to talk about, you know, X, Y, Z. And so that's where it gets really difficult.”
Davis: Creator engagement pods end up looking like fake engagement to agencies
“Another thing that people do that they think is helping, but ultimately is sort of engagement farming is they form these sort of collectives. So like, you know, me and you would be in a group with 48 other like business podcasters. And every time you publish t…”
Davis: Forcing creators into hard direct-response CTAs kills their credibility
“We think creators are incredible, like education, awareness, persuasion play, and that kind of more, that softer upper funnel stuff is so important and creators can do that incredibly well. And then the folks who saw your video should be getting like a crazy d…”