There has been a lot of buzz around Jimmy Fallon’s ascension into the most coveted hosting slot on television. Deservedly so. In his debut week, he had the most watched week of The Tonight Show since 1993, the highest ranking Monday night airing since 1992, and the top Thursday night airing since the Friends finale in 2004. (Variety)

There are a lot of factors that play into this success. The move back to NYC. The curiosity of how a new host will perform. The Olympics. However, the most interesting factor is his wild success on YouTube. His YouTube channel already has more than 2.3 million subscribers and north of 500 million total views. For the sake of comparison, Jay Leno’s channel has just over 130,000 subscribers and 94 million total views. David Letterman? Just under 30,000 subscribers and over 9 million total views.

All three are selling the same product. All three have the most talented writers in the world working for them. All three have an unlimited amount of resources at their disposal. Yet, one brand is taking the lion’s share of the viewership. Why is this? What can brands learn from this?

People visit YouTube for three reasons - entertainment, discovery, or education. Your brand doesn’t have to be the best at all three. In fact, it doesn’t have to be the BEST at any of the three. It does, however, need to follow the rules of the landscape. Below are four takeaways from The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

Cosistency: Fallon obviously focuses on entertainment. We can be sure this is consistent in every video upload. Every time a viewer visits his channel they know what they are getting. It’s the reason they keep coming back.





Leno and Letterman are bringing entertainment, why haven’t they realized the same amount of success? Because Fallon further leverages YouTube’s strengths to drive views on the site itself and traffic back to his show.

Call-To-Action: Every video ends with clickable annotations. These can link back to other videos, ask for subscriptions, link to Twitter or Facebook, etc. The point is to keep viewers engaged. Engaged viewers become informed customers.









YouTube is Social: Most brands fail to remember that YouTube is a social media platform. By treating it as a hosting platform for their advertisement, they are missing a huge opportunity. Not only that, they are spending money with little-to-no return.







Give them Something Extra: Fallon has a whole playlist of videos that are “web-only”. Meaning, he’s giving viewers a reason to come back to the site constantly aside from the videos they’ve already viewed or clips from the previous evening’s show. This could be behind the scenes of each video you produce or a Q&A session or a site discount, etc. Use your imagination, but give your subscribers a reason to continue to come back.





There you have it - Jimmy Fallon went from entertaining, to entertaining AND educational with one blog post. What other insights would you add?

Mark Borum - VP, Marketing