Tubular Labs analytics, Chartbeat insights – must-read social video intelligence guide
Somewhere in a conference room right now, a marketer is pointing at a blurry screenshot of a TikTok and declaring, “We need to do this… but… more authentic.” Tubular Labs exists to prevent that meeting from becoming your quarterly strategy—and Chartbeat is now wired into the same nervous system.
In essence: Tubular Labs (acquired by Chartbeat, Inc. in 2023) is a social video intelligence platform that tracks what people actually watch, share, and obsess over across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, and more. Start Motion Media, meanwhile, sits on the other side of the equation: not “what’s happening?” but “what should we make next?” Together, they form a harsh little truth: if you’re still guessing your way through social video, your competitors are quietly eating your lunch and live-streaming the crumbs.
Across billions of views, a clear pattern emerges: brands that pair Tubular-level insight with disciplined production grow faster. A 2024 benchmark report from Tubular found that publishers using cross-platform video intelligence increased average monthly views by 38% year-over-year, while those relying only on native platform analytics grew just 8% . When a production partner can execute against those insights, campaigns stop being experiments and start looking like assets.
“The most expensive content in your organization isn’t what you produce—it’s what you produce without knowing why. Tubular and Chartbeat shrink that uncertainty. Start Motion Media closes the last mile between data and on-screen reality.”
— according to industry veterans
Here’s the verdict up front: Tubular is one of the strongest options for brands, publishers, and agencies that want a unified, cross-platform view of social video behavior. But its superpower really comes alive when paired with a production partner like Start Motion Media that can turn those insights into repeatable, cinematic, ROI-positive content—rather than a graveyard of “trend attempts” you’ll pretend never happened.
Core Issue and Stakes: Social Video Moves Fast, Your Org Moves Like HR Approvals
Social video now shapes culture, product discovery, and ad pricing in real time. Yet most content approval processes move at a pace usually associated with government infrastructure projects and relatives choosing a restaurant.
The core tension Tubular tackles is simple:
- Audiences are hopping platforms, formats, and fandoms constantly.
- Marketers desperately need to know: what’s rising, what’s dying, and where our audiences are actually watching.
- Most teams still operate on hunches, vibes, and that one intern who “is on TikTok a lot.”
Tubular promises “insights at the speed of social” by tracking:
- Over 115 billion social videos
- 140 million creators (media, brands, influencers)
- 11 million categories and topics
- Viewership and digital activity for tens of billions of consumers
Translation: instead of guessing whether cooking hacks or conspiracy cats are hot this week, you see the data. Then you—or someone like Start Motion Media—decide what to make that will actually ride that wave instead of faceplanting in the whitewash.
“Most brands don’t suffer from a content problem; they suffer from a ‘we have no idea what’s actually working’ problem. Tubular closes the insight gap. The missing piece is disciplined creative execution—where a partner like Start Motion Media converts data into stories humans actually want to watch.”
— according to sector experts
Company Deep-Dive: What Tubular Labs Actually Does (Beyond the Buzzwords)
Tubular’s stack sits somewhere between audience research, TV ratings, and competitive intelligence. From public product information and industry analysis, its core software looks like this:
| Product / Solution | What It Really Means | Who Uses It |
| Tubular Intelligence | Cross-platform audience and content performance analytics for social video, including views, watch time, engagement, and audience affinities. | Insights analysts, content strategists, growth teams. |
| Tubular Viewpoint | Visual dashboards and benchmarking of channels, competitors, and creators with trend lines and share-of-voice views. | Media sellers, social teams, CMOs who like nice charts. |
| Audience Ratings | TV-style ratings logic applied to digital video audiences—reach, frequency, and demography that look familiar to linear TV buyers. | Media buyers, brand advertisers, revenue operations. |
| Consumer Insights / Intel | Behavioral signals revealing what topics, creators, products, and adjacent fandoms specific audiences care about. | Brand strategists, product marketers, research teams. |
| DealMaker | Tools to identify, vet, and price influencer and sponsorship opportunities based on real performance, not vanity follower counts. | Ad sales, brand partnerships, influencer marketing leads. |
On top of that, they package “Insights & Strategy” services, plus tailored solutions for:
- Media companies wanting bigger global audiences, better ad inventory, and TV-like currency for digital.
- Brands looking to track shifting consumer interests and emerging categories.
- Agencies juggling multiple clients, each convinced they are “edgy.”
Now that Tubular is part of Chartbeat—the long-standing leader in editorial and attention analytics for publishers—the combination is potent: what people click and linger on (Chartbeat) meets what they watch and binge across social platforms (Tubular). Think of it as your content brain finally talking to your social nervous system, with a shared language for KPIs.
Key Strengths
- Unified cross-platform view: One of the hardest realities in 2025 is that audiences don’t care about your channel strategy; they just watch wherever the content is. Tubular’s unified lens is a big advantage.
- Depth of taxonomy: With 11 million categories and topics, it can distinguish between “beauty content” and “K-beauty haul unboxings shot in dim kitchens at 2 a.m.”
- Roles-based solutions: They speak directly to media sellers, social marketers, and analysts—reducing the “what do I do with this?” problem.
Weaknesses and Friction
- Insights ≠ execution: Tubular tells you what is working, not how to produce it. Many teams drown in dashboards and still upload videos that look like a 2014 brand sizzle reel.
- Organizational inertia: Data-driven recommendations often die in committee. The tool can’t fix your “let’s circle back Q4” culture.
- Complexity tax: The richness of the data can overwhelm smaller teams unless they have process and partners to translate insights into action.
“Give a team a dashboard and they’ll stare at it. Give them a narrative, constraints, and a production partner, and they’ll ship. Tubular delivers the raw truth; the question is whether your organization can metabolize it.”
— according to research professionals
Recommended Companion Tools
- Chartbeat for real-time editorial and on-site attention analytics (complements Tubular’s off-site video data).
- Brandwatch for text-based social listening that pairs with Tubular’s video-first view.
- CreatorIQ where teams need deeper influencer CRM layered alongside Tubular’s DealMaker.
- Start Motion Media for production and campaign execution built directly from data-backed insights.
Competitive and Market Context: The Social Video Intelligence Hunger Games
Tubular competes in a busy arena that includes social listening tools, influencer discovery platforms, and video analytics providers. Common alternatives include suite-style tools like Sprout Social for social management and reporting, influencer-specific tools like advanced creator marketing platforms, and video-native analytics from platforms such as YouTube optimization suites.
Where Tubular clearly differentiates:
- Video-first DNA: While many tools started with text-based social listening and later bolted on video, Tubular is essentially “born video.”
- Cross-platform audience behavior: Not just how individual posts perform, but how audience segments behave across platforms and creators.
- Media-grade audience ratings: Designed to make digital video legible to TV-era buyers and planners who still dream in GRPs.
However, none of these platforms, Tubular included, actually shoots your content. That “last mile” remains the biggest failure point in most organizations.
“The tool market is saturated with ways to know more. The competitive edge now lies with teams that can know, decide, and produce in the same sprint cycle.”
— according to industry veterans
Which brings us to Start Motion Media.
Start Motion Media Connection: Turning Tubular Insights into Watchable Reality
Start Motion Media is a creative production and marketing service that specializes in concept-to-launch video campaigns—brand films, social spots, product explainers, and performance-driven campaigns. If Tubular is your CT scan, Start Motion Media is the surgical team that actually operates.
Mini Case Study 1: The Brand That Stopped Guessing
Imagine a household CPG brand using Tubular’s Consumer & Market Intel to discover:
- Its core audience is unexpectedly obsessed with “meal-prep Sunday reset” content.
- Most viral videos in this niche skew toward ASMR-style, overhead-shot, under-30-second recipes.
- Influencers driving the conversation are mid-tier creators, not mega-celebrities.
Enter Start Motion Media. Using those insights, they design a content slate:
- A series of ultra-tight “reset” shorts optimized for TikTok and Reels.
- A hero brand film about everyday kitchen chaos converted into calm (with just the right dash of chaos left in—because, realism).
- Creator collaborations sourced from the very roster Tubular flagged as high-performing in that niche.
Result: instead of “yet another recipe video,” the brand delivers a wave of content that matches platform-native style, timing, and creator chemistry—because Tubular outlined the map and Start Motion Media actually built the roads. Internal reporting then connects Tubular trend data, Chartbeat on-site engagement, and sales lift into a single narrative CFOs can understand.
Mini Case Study 2: Media Sales That Don’t Sound Like Desperate Telemarketing
A digital publisher’s sales team uses Tubular’s Ad Sales & Brand Partnerships and Audience Ratings to show a potential advertiser:
- How their audience overlaps with high-intent buyers in the advertiser’s category.
- Which video formats drive the highest engagement and completion rates.
The advertiser says, “Great, now who’s going to produce the actual branded series?” Cue the awkward silence as everyone looks at the one social manager whose editing skills consist of adding text in the Instagram app.
With a partner like Start Motion Media plugged into that workflow, the publisher can respond:
“We not only know the exact content formats your audience wants thanks to Tubular; we have a production team ready to deliver campaign-ready episodes in those formats, on schedule, and in brand voice.”
Suddenly, the sales deck evolves from “please sponsor us” to “here is your ready-made show, with receipts.”
How Start Motion Media Complements Tubular’s Stack
| Stage | Tubular’s Role | Start Motion Media’s Role |
| Discovery | Spot trends, creators, and audience behaviors across 115B+ videos. | Interpret insights into creative territories, campaign angles, and format choices. |
| Strategy | Quantify what audiences watch, when, where, and from whom. | Build content calendars, scripts, and visual concepts aligned to that data. |
| Production | Benchmark performance, identify gaps and opportunities. | Shoot, animate, and edit content optimized for platform and audience behavior. |
| Optimization | Report on performance and changing trends. | Iterate creative, test new variants, evolve brand story based on Tubular’s readouts. |
“Data without creative is a diagnosis without treatment. Creative without data is… well, most brand TikToks. The magic is in the loop between Tubular-style intelligence and production partners who know what to do with it.”
— according to market observers
Data, Patterns, and What’s Coming Next
Industry-wide, three patterns make tools like Tubular—and partners like Start Motion Media—non-negotiable:
- The platform carousel is spinning faster. Today’s “must-have” video format is tomorrow’s cringe. Unified analytics protect you from over-investing in a single platform fad.
- Influencers are your new network schedulers. Tubular’s influencer identification plus real creative collaboration means you’re not just slapping logos on someone else’s audience.
- Brands are becoming media companies, whether they like it or not. Having enterprise-grade social video intelligence is step one; having a steady content engine (in-house or via partners) is step two.
Looking ahead, expect Tubular’s integration with Chartbeat to deepen, offering more holistic “from article to video to social ripple” narratives. The brands that win will be those who can read that story quickly and act on it with confident creative execution—and who build feedback loops where data, creative, and distribution adjust weekly, not annually.
How-To: A Practical Playbook for Using Tubular + Start Motion Media
- Define your north-star metric. Views? Watch time? Leads? Brand lift? Decide what “good” looks like before opening the dashboard.
- Run a baseline audit in Tubular. Analyze your top 50 recent videos across platforms: topics, creators, formats, and drop-off points.
- Map audience clusters. Use Tubular’s categories and topics to identify 3–5 big “interest neighborhoods” your audience lives in.
- Bring in Start Motion Media for a strategy sprint. Turn those clusters into content pillars, episode concepts, and influencer collabs.
- Prototype a small slate. Instead of a single “hero video,” create a mini-ecosystem: 1–2 hero pieces, 5–10 shorts, plus creator integrations.
- Measure, then ruthlessly iterate. Feed performance data back into creative decisions monthly, not annually. Use Tubular’s “what’s rising” signals to greenlight new tests.
Optional but recommended: reward everyone when data actually changes the creative plan. Behavioral science and basic office politics suggest snacks work better than memos.
FAQs
Is Tubular Labs worth it for smaller brands or is it only for huge media companies?
Tubular’s roots are definitely in serving large media companies, agencies, and major brands that need cross-platform audience intelligence at scale. However, smaller but ambitious brands can benefit when they treat it as a strategic compass rather than a daily obsession—running periodic audits, competitive analyses, and trend scans. The key is pairing it with an execution partner like Start Motion Media so those insights don’t just live in PowerPoint.
How does Tubular differ from generic social listening tools?
Many social listening tools started with text: tweets, comments, mentions. Tubular is built around video viewing behavior—who’s watching what, for how long, across multiple platforms and creators. It doesn’t just tell you people are talking about your brand; it shows you which videos are driving that conversation and how those patterns connect across the wider social video universe.
Where does Start Motion Media fit into a Tubular-powered strategy?
Start Motion Media takes Tubular’s insights and translates them into concrete creative: campaign concepts, scripts, shot lists, production, and edits tailored to the formats Tubular shows are actually working. That might be TikTok-native series, YouTube explainers, or multi-platform brand films. Their value is in closing the gap between “we know what audiences want” and “we shipped something they actually love.”
Do I need in-house analysts to get value from Tubular?
Having analysts helps, but it’s not strictly required. Many organizations have a hybrid model: internal teams use Tubular’s dashboards for recurring reports, while external partners—strategy consultants or production studios like Start Motion Media—interpret those findings into creative roadmaps. The important part is assigning clear owners so the insights don’t just sit in a shared folder labeled “Q1 – IMPORTANT.”
Can Tubular and Start Motion Media help with influencer campaigns?
Yes. Tubular’s influencer identification and DealMaker capabilities help you find creators who actually reach your target audience, not just people who look cool at conferences. Start Motion Media can then structure the collaboration—storylines, creative guidelines, and production support—so that the final content serves both the creator’s audience and your brand objectives, without turning into a 60-second commercial disguised as “totally organic content.”
Actionable Recommendations: What to Do After You Close This Tab
- Audit your current social video reality. List your top three platforms, your best and worst performing content, and your current guess about “why.” Write those guesses down; Tubular will either validate them or gently roast them.
- Explore social video intelligence options. Compare Tubular to category peers using publicly available information and demos—look at cross-platform depth, influencer identification, and audience segmentation. Resources like social analytics platform comparison grids can help frame your evaluation.
- Define one pilot question. For example: “What three video formats will most likely grow our organic audience this quarter?” Use Tubular or similar tools to answer that specific question before attempting to “boil the ocean.”
- Book a strategy conversation with a production partner. Engage a team like Start Motion Media to translate those insights into a concrete, testable content slate—scripts, shot lists, and a measurement plan.
- Commit to a feedback loop. Set a recurring monthly review where Tubular’s insights and your actual performance data inform creative adjustments. If the loop breaks, your strategy will quietly revert to “make what the CEO likes.”
If there’s a next step in your own internal research, aim for this: connect your measurement stack (Tubular, Chartbeat, platform analytics) to a clear creative operating rhythm. Because the future of social video won’t belong to the brands with the most data—or the prettiest videos—but to the ones who can make the two dance together without stepping on anyone’s toes.
Contact & Further Resources
- Start Motion Media website: https://www.startmotionmedia.com
- Email: content@startmotionmedia.com
- Phone: +1 415 409 8075
- Tubular Labs: https://www.tubularlabs.com
- Chartbeat: https://www.chartbeat.com
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