5 étapes faciles pour l'analyse des concurrents sur YouTube en 2025 [+étude de cas GoPro]

Be aware, YouTube competitor analysis might cause a jaw-dropping effect! Here’s a quick story: I always thought GoPro was the undisputed king of action cameras on YouTube. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that, in the last 3 months, DJI reached over twice as many YouTube users as GoPro (1.8 billion vs 806 million). That’s not just a shift in numbers; it’s a shift in influence. To understand why, I decided to take a closer look at their channels, audiences, and strategies. 

• This article is a deep dive into YouTube competitor analysis — the process of uncovering what makes your rivals grow faster, reach wider, and engage deeper.
• After reading it, you will:
  • Savoir what YouTube competitor analysis is
  • Comprendre why it’s essential for your channel’s growth
  • Learn practical skills on how to identify competitors and evaluate their content performance, SEO strategy, audience feedback & preferences, and benchmarking
  • See how to use YouTube competitor analysis tools like Studio YouTube, Brand24et VidIQ
  • Get inspired by real-life GoPro case study

What is YouTube competitor analysis?

YouTube competitor analysis is the process of researching the performance of other channels in your niche to understand what makes them successful. 

It aims to identify content gaps, overall YouTube strategy, strengths, weaknesses & audience engagement metrics to inspire your future actions and gain a higher share in your niche. 

Why do you need a YouTube competitor analysis?

YouTube is much more than just a content platform. It’s a battleground for attention, l'autoritéet influence. 

A well-designed (and executed) analyse des concurrents helps you move from intuition to insight and gives you a clearer growth path. 

Here’s why you need a YouTube competitor analysis:

• It’s not just about competitive content — it’s about competitive brands.
  Your rivals might have totally different goals, positioning, or content strategies, but their actions can still reveal valuable insights you can adapt to your own context.
• It helps you identify repeatable success patterns.
  By observing what works (and what doesn’t) for others, you can save time, avoid costly mistakes, and conclude what can resonate with your shared audience.
• It reveals content gaps and untapped opportunities.
  Whether it’s a format your competitors overlook or a niche they haven’t fully covered, in-depth analysis gives you the foundation to stand out and grow faster.

In short, it’s not about copying — it’s about learning what works and using it to build a smarter, stronger Stratégie de marketing sur YouTube that supports your business goals.

How to analyze your competitors on YouTube in 5 Steps?

Step 1: Identify competitive YouTube channels

If you want to analyze YouTube competitors, you must start by finding them. 

The two most practical tactics are…

Use YouTube search strategically

The first and most obvious way to discover competitors’ channels is to use a YouTube search. 

Let’s do some practice to explain the whole concept better. 

Imagine you’re a YouTube strategist for GoPro (if you’re unfamiliar with this company, GoPro is the world’s best-known brand for action cameras. 

GoPro’s YouTube (and social media) strategy focuses on showcasing its products in practice by publishing exciting, first-person videos captured by athletes, adventurers, and creators worldwide. 

These videos usually present dynamic perspectives on activities such as surfing monstrous waves, extreme skiing, skydiving, or mountain biking. 

As a GoPro YouTube strategist, you aim to find similar creators and brands that use comparable content formats or appeal to similar audiences. And those who sell products similar to yours – action cameras.

Therefore, you can list keywords people type into the YouTube search tab and split them into categories. 

For example, in the case of GoPro, there could be:

• Activity keywords like “mountain biking POV” or “adventure travel vlog”
• Gear-based keywords like “GoPro 12 alternatives” or “skiing action camera”.

This method allows you to easily discover not only YouTube channels that operate in your niche, but also your competitive brands. 

It’s worth visiting their channels and familiarizing yourself with their YouTube marketing strategies.

By the way, if you need inspiration on which keywords to type in a YouTube search, go to YouTube Studio -> Analytics -> How viewers find your videos. 

Now, set the traffic source to “YouTube search” and see your top keywords. 

That’s a great starting point for your YouTube keyword research.

Ask the AI assistant

The YouTube search method has one major disadvantage – it takes time. A lot of time.

But there is a way to do the YouTube competitor research much faster. It’s the AI.

Precisely speaking, the AI assistant that accesses your YouTube channel’s internal data.

Just like the Brand24 AI Brand Assistant.

Brand24 est un outil de suivi des médias that allows you to track and analyze public mentions from multiple online sources, like:

• YouTube (and other video platforms)
• Médias sociaux (Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Telegram, and Twitch)
• Non-social sources (news sites, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, review platforms, and other websites)

One of its core features, the Assistant de marque AI, works like ChatGPT, but better. 

The upgrade is its access to special YouTube data – the volume of channel mentions, their reach, detailed sentiment, and much more.

The whole process is simple:

1. Sign up for a free 14-day Brand24 trial.
2. Create a project for your brand or YouTube channel.
3. Give a tool a few minutes to collect and analyze your YouTube mentions.
4. Select the AI Brand Assistant tab and type your prompt, like “What are [your YouTube channel name] most important YouTube competitors?”

And voila! The Brand Assistant will generate a ready-made list of top competitors for your YouTube channel.

Step 2: Examine their content performance

Let’s make it clear – competitor analysis on YouTube isn’t just about scrolling through their channels. You need to dig into what actually performs well and why it matters.

That’s how you can spot patterns et set realistic benchmarks for your own content strategy. 

I’ll help you out with that.

Here’s a list of the top 10 questions you should ask to analyze YouTube competitors like a pro:

1. What are their top-performing videos about?
2. What is the reach of their YouTube channels?
3. How often do they publish new content?
4. What video formats do they often use (tutorials, vlogs, reviews, etc.)?
5. What content formats do they mostly use (regular videos or shorts)?
6. At what time is their audience most active?
7. What is their view count?
8. How engaging is their comment section? Do they get meaningful interaction?
9. Does their audience react positively or negatively?
10. Do their thumbnails, titles, and branding feel cohesive and on point?

Now, let’s do a real-life YouTube competitive analysis of one of GoPro’s direct YouTube niche competitors – Insta360.

We’ll walk through only three of these questions to avoid getting too wordy.

1. What are their top-performing videos about?

I visited the Insta360 YouTube channel and filtered the results by popularity to see their top videos.

Their content strategy mixes product storytelling, influencer collaborations, teaser-driven hype, and product tutorials. Let’s stop on the last type for a while.

Le how-to videos are engaging and usually enjoy a long watch time, which is one of the key Mesures sur YouTube. 

Among the top 30 best-performing videos on the Insta360 channel, there are three how-to tutorials:

• How to film four epic stop-motion shots
• How to shoot travel videos with your phone 
• How to use Insta360 AI editing in 3 minutes

Nice inspiration for the GoPro channel, which generally lacks such tutorials!

2. What is the reach of their YouTube channel?

Next, let’s check the total reach of the Insta360 channel. 

This information helps illustrate the scale of the channel’s audience et le effectiveness of their video distribution.

To do so, let’s visit the Brand24 analysis tab. It provides a quick overview of the most essential competitor insights.

As we want to do only one YouTube channel analytics, we need to apply two filters:

• Auteur : Insta360
• Domain: youtube.com

The Overview section disclaims that Insta360’s video content on YouTube reached nearly 2.5 million users in 30 days (you can easily change the date range if needed!).

I switched the view to the Mentions tab for more details. The chart presents the daily distribution of YouTube reach (green line).

One thing that caught my attention was the spike in reach from May 19th. 

I decided to check what caused it using the Détecteur d'événements.

In short, it is the AI-powered Brand24 feature that identifies anomalies (like the unexpected increase in reach), searches for the possible reason, and presents it in one or two essential sentences.

The spike in the Insta360 channel’s reach was caused by a stunning video presenting a bullet time effect. 

Another nice inspiration for GoPro’s YouTube strategy!

3. What is their view count?

I was curious about the total view count of the Insta360 channel content in the last 30 days. How to discover it?

I could have opened my calculator app, checked the video views for that period, and summed them up. 

Honestly? It would be like hammering nails with a kettle.

You can do it (if your kettle is hard enough), but what’s the point if you have better tools?

So, I decided to do it with VidIQ – one of the best YouTube outils d'analyse de la concurrence.

VidIQ allows you to select your competitor’s YouTube channel and check its key metrics, such as subscriber growth or – yes – vues de la vidéo.

According to these performance data, Insta360’s YouTube content was viewed 4.1 million times. The channel’s performance seems to have slightly decreased compared to the previous month.

To have a clearer picture, I benchmarked GoPro and Insta360 video views on one chart.

Obviously, the GoPro channel is doing better. But it can’t lose sight of its ambitious competitor videos!

For more insights into key performance indicators on YouTube, see my previous article: How to Measure YouTube Performance?

Step 3: Identify YouTube SEO strategy

There’s a myth that YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the World. 

Whereas it’s not entirely true (as YouTube is a part of the Google ecosystem), optimizing the textual elements of your YouTube content is important for boosting your YouTube visibility.

And it’s not only about YouTube search because videos rank in Google search as well!

💡 Important notice

The algorithms quickly change and become more and more intelligent. They understand synonyms and context much better than 1 or 2 years ago. 

C'est pourquoi, today’s YouTube SEO is less about keyword stuffing and more about pertinence, clarityet user intent.

Let’s quickly explore the most important things you should analyze to learn from your competitor YouTube SEO practices:

Titres des vidéos

Look at how your competitors create their titles. Ask yourself:

• Do they use specific keywords like “360 action camera review” ou “GoPro Hero12 unboxing”?
• Are their titles optimized for searchability, emotionou curiosity?
• Do they include brand names, model identification, or use cases?

💡 Tip: Use tools like TubeBuddy or VidIQ to see the keywords the titles rank for.

Video descriptions

According to a Backlinko study, there’s no correlation between SEO keywords in descriptions and ranking positions. However, that doesn’t mean you should ignore them.

In fact, they serve two important purposes:

1. They provide context for YouTube’s algorithm, helping it better understand the content, especially when paired with spoken keywords and metadata.
2. They improve the viewer experience, offering summaries, timestamps, links to related content, or CTAs. All of these impact essential YouTube metrics such as watch time and engagement.

When analyzing competitor descriptions, look at the structure, keyword placement, linking strategy, and other elements that capture your attention.

Thumbnails

Thumbnails don’t directly influence YouTube SEO in the traditional sense, but they play an important role in click-through rate (CTR).

When analyzing your competitors’ thumbnails, ask:

• Are they using bold text or relying purely on visuals?
• Do they consistently feature faces, gear, or dynamic action shots?
• Do they use the same color palette, font, or layout?
• Do the thumbnails complement or repeat the video title?

Step 4: Learn about their audience

Imagine the target audience as a campfire circle.

Each competitor’s YouTube channel is like a different campfire burning in the digital wilderness.

Around each fire sits a tribe – a community built on stories, values, and shared interests.

Your job is to quietly approach these circles, listen to what people talk about, and observe what keeps them warm and makes them come back.

The question is – how can you do it in practice? Well, there are two ways:

Studio YouTube

The native YouTube analytics allows you to discover both the competitors’ channels that your audience watcheset le competitor videos they watch.

There’s one problem with that feature. 

If your channel is too small or doesn’t yet have enough traffic, YouTube won’t display this data. You’ll see a message like “Not enough viewer data to show this report.”

That could be frustrating, especially when you’re just starting and need insights the most.

But don’t worry — there’s a second, unlimited way to gather valuable audience intelligence.

Fortunately, there is a way to uncover other channels’ audience insights.

Brand24’s media monitoring

As I described before, Brand24 is a surveillance des médias tool that tracks and analyzes brand mentions all over the web – including YouTube.

The tool offers a bunch of features that can reveal a lot of handy insights about your YouTube competitors’ audience preferences.

The best way is to show them to you in practice! 

I’ll go back to our GoPro example and analyze Insta360’s (GoPro’s competitor) YouTube presence. We’ll target four questions regarding its audience.

1. What do they talk about?

The Brand24 Analyse du sujet is an AI-powered feature that clusters discussion threads into common topics. This allows you to discover which issues dominate the campfire conversations.

Insta360’s audience engagement centers on action cams technology, travel & outdoor activities, and motorcycle lifestyle.

The last one is the most concrete example, so it would be a good idea to examine whether GoPro could exploit this topic more.

2. When is the Insta360 audience most active?

Here, we’ll use the Heures chaudes caractéristiques.

It’s a simple matrix presenting the days and times when YouTube discussions about your competitor’s brand peak.

Think of it as a heatmap of the campfire’s flames, showing you exactly when the tribe gathers most intensely.

As you can see, the Insta360 audience interactions mostly occur on weekday afternoons.

Lire la suite : Quel est le meilleur moment pour publier sur YouTube ?

3. What emotions do they express?

Here we’ll turn to analyse des sentiments, another powerful feature of Brand24. 

It detects whether people talk about the brand in a positif, neutreou négatif tone. 

This way, you can discover both the big picture of your YouTube competitor sentiment and granular mentions that triggered (dis)satisfaction.

In the case of Insta360, their overall sentiment is definitely positive. The slight spikes point at the days when the new videos were published.

4. Where are their viewers from?

Knowing the geographical distribution of your competitor’s audience gives you a powerful edge. 

Vous pouvez tailor your content, publishing schedule, and campaign messaging to resonate better with specific regions.

In practice, you can:

• Publish content during your top locations’ peak engagement hours
• Collaborate with regional influencers
• Highlight product use cases relevant to those locations.

Here, we’ll use Brand24’s Geo Analysis feature.

As you can see, in terms of reach, Insta360 targets high-populated countries like the US, India, Germany, France, the UK, and Spain.

These densely populated regions represent highly engaged tech-savvy communities, often active in content creation, travel, and outdoor activities.

Step 5: Benchmark with competitors

Last but not least, you should benchmark your YouTube performance with your direct competitors. 

Seriously — it may seem obvious, but too many creators look only inward and ignore what’s happening around them. 

Benchmarking helps you gain valuable insights and put your numbers in context: are your views, engagement, sentiment, or subscriber growth really impressive? Or just average for your niche?

We’ll do it using two familiar tools: Brand24 et VidIQ.

Below, you can see the Compare Project table from the Brand24 dashboard. There are a couple of interesting conclusions from May 2025:

• DJI’s YouTube presence is twice as high as GoPro’s et 3 times higher than Insta360’s
• DJI’s YouTube reach (390 million) is higher than its two major competitors’ combined (361 million)
• Insta360’s YouTube channel and video analytics reveal that it enjoys the most positive sentiment in its direct competitive landscape
• GoPro does not overcome its current key competitors in any category (sic!)

DJI’s dominance is even more visible when we look at the part de voix charts.

The VidiQ competitive insights confirm how mighty DJI’s YouTube presence is. Within a month, GoPro videos were watched 7.5 million times. 

Meanwhile, DJI’s content was watched 10 times more!

A quick glance at the Compare Performance bar chart reveals that calling this situation “a domination” is wrong.

It’s pure supremacy. 

And it doesn’t really matter which YouTube metrics you will check. 

Conclusion

Competitor analysis on YouTube gives you clear direction. It helps you uncover what works for others so you can make smarter content decisions. 

Studying your rivals’ channels, video formats, publishing schedules, and top-performing content lets you spot patterns and missed opportunities. 

By understanding their SEO strategies and audience preferences, you can learn how to position your own brand better. 

Tools like YouTube Studio and VidIQ offer detailed performance insights, while Brand24 gives you a broader look at audience sentiment, discussion trends, and reach. 

Using Brand24’s Assistant de marque AI, you can quickly list top competitors and see when and where their fans are most engaged. 

Benchmarking your performance against others shows whether you’re leading, keeping pace, or falling behind. 

With this data-driven approach, you can upgrade your YouTube strategy and grow more effectively. 

And without time-wasting guesswork.

Réflexions finales :

• Successful YouTube creators understand that their work doesn’t end on the platform – they must keep an eye on the bigger picture
• Surveillance de YouTube your niche helps you keep pace with fast-changing trends.
• AI tools like Brand24 AI Brand Assistant save time and reveal insights you might miss on your own.
• Positive sentiment can be as valuable as high view counts.
• Competitive analysis is not about copying but about evolving your strategy.

Démarrer un essai gratuit Brand24 de 14 jours to discover & analyze your YouTube competitors!