OUR QUALITY STANDARD
Brand safety isn't enough. We go further.
A channel can be perfectly brand safe and still be a poor environment for your brand. A looping fireplace video playing in the background of a living room is brand safe, contextually relevant, and gets impressive view-through rates — because no one is paying attention. That's not where brands grow. We define quality differently. And in 2023, BARB agreed with us — adopting our quality framework as the basis for their YouTube measurement methodology.
The five categories of TV-like content
Created for TV
Content professionally produced for broadcast television — including TV shows, films, documentaries, trailers and sport. The gold standard of professionally produced content, now available on YouTube.
TNT Sports
BBC
ITV
Created by Media
Content produced by reputable, established media organisations — including national newspapers, magazine publishers, radio stations and digital publishers. Editorial credibility, carried onto the platform.
Telegraph
Vogue
GQ
Created by Icons
Content produced by — or centred on — culturally significant individuals. Celebrities, artists, authors, musicians and podcasters whose audiences are deeply engaged and genuinely loyal.
Gary Neville
Jamie Oliver
Created like TV
Content produced for YouTube in a recognisably professional, TV-style format — by established organisations, institutions, sports teams and production companies. The production values and editorial intent are comparable to broadcast.
Drive Tribe
Hot Ones
High Value Creators
YouTube-native creators who have built large, loyal and deeply engaged audiences through consistent, professionally produced, episodic content. These are not influencers. These are publishers.
Carwow
AFTV
And what we leave out
If a channel doesn't fall into one of these five categories, it won't appear on a SeeViews plan. That means we exclude passive viewing content, low-quality user-generated content, screen-filmed gaming content, misleadingly tagged channels, and unauthorised re-uploads of copyrighted material. Not because they're harmful — but because they're not the right environment for brand building.
Passive viewing content
Low-quality UGC
Screen-filmed gaming
Misleadingly tagged channels
Unauthorised re-uploads
The standard the Industry has Endorsed
When BARB — the UK's most respected audience measurement organisation — set out to build a YouTube measurement methodology, they needed a definition of quality to anchor it to.
They adopted ours. That isn't something we asked for. It's something we earned — through years of refinement, industry engagement and a rigorous, evidence-based approach to defining what premium content looks like in a digital environment. It means that when you use SeeViews, you're not trusting our word about quality. You're trusting the same standard that BARB built their measurement system on.